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Also known as: cookery

Written by Nathan Myhrvold
Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: May 13, 2024 • Article History

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Cooking | Techniques, Recipes & Nutrition | Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/cooking

Cooking, the act of using heat to prepare food for consumption. Cooking is
as old as civilization itself, and observers have perceived it as both an art and
a science. Its history sheds light on the very origins of human settlement,
and its variety and traditions reflect unique social, cultural, and
environmental influences. The following article traces the evolution of
cooking to the advent of national cuisines. See also cuisine; grande cuisine;
nouvelle cuisine; molecular gastronomy; culture sections of assorted country
articles.

Origins: from hunter-gatherers to settled

agriculturalists
The precise origins of cooking are unknown, but, at some point in the
distant past, early humans conquered fire and started using it to prepare
food. Researchers have found what appear to be the remains of campfires
made 1.5 million years ago by Homo erectus, one of the early human species.
In fact, anthropologists such as Richard Wrangham have argued that
cooking played an essential role in human evolution. Cooking foods makes
them more digestible, so the calories and some of the nutrients in them are
easier to absorb. Thus, cooking allowed early humans to tap a wider variety
of food sources and gain more nutrition from them.

Archaeological evidence of food preparation, backed up by knowledge of

how modern-day hunter-gatherers prepare their food, suggests that the first
cooks did little to their food in the way of preparation or technique. The
flesh of animals was either roasted over a fire or boiled in water to make it
tender, fruit was gathered and peeled, and nuts were shelled. Necessity,
rather than flavour, usually dictated how hunter-gatherers of the past
prepared their food. Some foods had to be prepared carefully to remove
toxins. Native American tribes in California, for example, developed a
procedure to make acorns edible by removing their bitter tannic acid.
Farther south, native peoples in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela learned to
remove the cyanide from cassava (also called manioc), a starchy root used to

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remove the cyanide from cassava (also called manioc), a starchy root used to
make tapioca and a staple crop across the tropics.

Hunter-gatherers processed foods to preserve them. Because some hunter-

gatherer societies faced uncertain food supplies, particularly in winter, they
developed techniques such as smoking and drying to make foods last longer.
They also created preparations such as pemmican (a mixture of meat, fat,
and sometimes fruit) to preserve foods. Alcohol required elaborate
preparation as well, and societies around the world perfected means to
ferment fruit or grain into alcohol.

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Agriculture was invented independently at different places and times around

the world, as people learned to domesticate local plants and animals and
began to live a settled life. That advance was a major turning point in human
history, as farming fed people more reliably than hunting wild game and
gathering wild plants, though farming was hardly easy or without risk in its
early days. It also had a major impact on the development of cooking.

Crop failures, which were frequent, meant famine and death, and
overreliance on one or a handful of crops resulted in malnutrition when
those crops lacked the necessary vitamins or nutrients. The archaeological
record reveals that starvation and vitamin deficiency were among the most-
prevalent health issues for early societies. Gradually, however, agricultural
societies improved their farming skills, increased their productivity, and
decreased the risk of famine. Farming became more productive than hunting
and gathering.

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Yet agriculture made diets boring. Whereas hunter-gatherers relied on a

wide variety of plants and animals, which changed with the seasons, farmers
were more restricted in the crops they could plant and thus routinely ate the
same foods. That motivated people to come up with ways to make their diets

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same foods. That motivated people to come up with ways to make their diets
more interesting and palatable, giving rise to a new reason for cooking:
improving the taste and variety of food. Because agriculture freed at least
some of society from the task of providing food, people began to spend time
doing other things, culinary experimentation included.

The professionalization of cooking

In most traditional societies, the task of daily food preparation fell primarily
to women—though both men and women were heavily involved in food
procurement. Civilization allowed more people to specialize in other
occupations, and that trend eventually produced a class of professional
chefs, whose main job was cooking for others. Tomb paintings, sculptures,
and archaeological remains from more than 5,000 years ago clearly show
that ancient Egypt already had many different food-related jobs, including
butchery, baking, brewing, and winemaking. Beer brewing may have been
initiated much earlier by the production of cereal crops, possibly 10,000
years ago. All of those professions had their own shops and facilities, often
with multiple employees working in well-organized kitchens.

Culinary professionals generally cooked quite differently from the women

who were cooking only for their families. Baking leavened bread, for
example, was largely a professional activity, because ovens were expensive to
own and operate. Much fuel was necessary to heat the earth, clay, or brick
interior of an oven, and, once the right temperature was reached, maximum
efficiency could be achieved only if many loaves were baked. Most people
bought or bartered for their bread.

Flatbreads, by contrast, could be cooked simply in a pan or even on a rock.

Cultures all over the world invented various forms of flatbread—from the
tortilla in Mexico to the chapati in India to lefse in Norway. Because
flatbreads did not require an oven or any elaborate preparation, they were
typically made at home as part of peasant cuisine.

The professionalization of baking, brewing, and winemaking occurred for

three reasons: capital equipment was expensive; increasingly complicated
food products required skill and expertise to prepare; and there was a
growing number of affluent customers. Chefs and culinary artisans were

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employed both for their practical uses and as status symbols, and people
willing to pay more for a better meal created a ready market for new recipes
and techniques.

Cuisines driven by class, climate, and politics

In early civilizations, wealth was nearly always synonymous with political or
religious power, so the primary employers of professional chefs were kings,
aristocrats, or priests. Much the same phenomenon occurred in the arts.
Painters produced commissioned works for the king or the high priest,
jewelers made the king’s crown and the queen’s jewels, and architects
designed palaces and temples.

That divide between professional chefs cooking for the wealthy and peasants
cooking for themselves drove the development of many cuisines. Each side
influenced the other. Professional chefs sought to do things differently than
the masses, to create a distinct culinary experience for their elite clientele.
Commoners, in turn, sought to adopt some of the finer things in life by
copying the dishes served at royal tables. Countries with a long history of a
large and stable aristocracy or ruling class developed the most complex,
highly refined, and elaborate cuisines. In those societies cooks and their
recipes produced a new form of one-upmanship.

France is perhaps the best example. Despite its vibrant regional peasant
cuisine, France was for centuries dominated by aristocratic food. Early on,
French nobles and other members of the ruling class used dinners as status
symbols. Most of the early French chefs, such as François Pierre La Varenne
and Marie-Antonin Carême, climbed the career ladder by moving to serve

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and Marie-Antonin Carême, climbed the career ladder by moving to serve

ever more-powerful and wealthy patrons. France is especially interesting
because it achieved renown for its cooking very early. La Varenne’s book Le
Cuisinier Francois (1651) was translated into English in 1653. Titled The
French Cook, the English edition included the following preface, which took
the form of a dedication to a wealthy patron (as was customary at the time):

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE John, Earl of Tannet

My very good Lord. Of all Cookes in the World the French are esteem’d the best, and of
all Cookes that ever France bred up, this may very well challenge the first place, as the
neatest and compleatest that ever attend the French Court and Armies. I have taught
him to speak English, to the end that he may be able to wait in your Lordships Kitchin;
and furnish your Table with severall Sauces of haut goust, & with dainty ragousts, and
sweet meats, as yet hardly known in this Land.

Besides the quaint punctuation and spelling, this preface clearly lays out
what would be the story for the next three centuries: France had a
reputation for having the world’s best chefs.

China also produced an aristocratically driven cuisine. The enormous variety

of Chinese dishes stems from the imperial courts of various dynasties. The
same occurred with the Mughal rulers of northern India and with the kings
of Thailand. In each area, the monarchy and its cadre of bureaucrats and
aristocrats supported full-time professional chefs, who created a rich and
varied cuisine.

England also had an elaborate monarchy, but its geography made the
development of a sophisticated cuisine difficult. Plant and animal diversity
is a direct result of climate: a cold climate leads to relatively low diversity,
providing less-varied ingredients for a chef to work with. As a result, far
northern (or in the Southern Hemisphere, far southern) cuisines do not have
the variety of dishes that equatorial regions produce. The Viking kings of
Scandinavia and the tsars of Russia had well-established courts and ruled
for centuries, but, like England, they did not have elaborate cuisines.

Sweeping views of history, such as the patterns in cuisine discussed here, are
always simplifications of a more-complicated situation, so there are
exceptions. Spain fits the theory only up to a point. Its Mediterranean
climate and long-standing monarchy and aristocracy accumulated enormous

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wealth by exploiting the New World, yet traditional Spanish cuisine owes
more to farm and peasant life than to that of the great Spanish court. That is
less true in Andalusia, where cuisine from the Islamic courts made a lasting
contribution.

There are many wonderful traditional German foods, but most come from
the peasant table, such as the numerous varieties of hearty sausages and
hams. One reason may be that Germany was not unified as a country until
the late 19th century. Before that time the region was carved into pieces
ruled by various European empires or complex confederations of countries
such as Prussia, Bohemia, Swabia, and Bavaria. Germany also suffered from
its northern location, which limited the diversity of indigenous fruits,
vegetables, and herbs.

Italy provides an even better example of how political fragmentation can

affect cuisine. Blessed by a favourable climate, the region produces a full
range of grains, fruits and vegetables, which is ideal for culinary diversity.
That diversity persisted in the absence of political unity, which otherwise
may have favoured one regional style over another. Until Italy was unified as
a country in 1870, the area was a patchwork of duchies, principalities, city-
states, republics, and territories controlled by foreign monarchs. There was
no permanent or centralized Italian monarchy and thus no royal court for
which chefs could create new dishes. Italy did have one permanent fixture,
the papacy, and some distinctive foods were developed for its religious feasts
and celebrations, but that cuisine differed greatly from the imperial haute
cuisine found in France or China. Italy’s culinary tradition is rooted in the
countryside, in Italy’s peasant origins. Although professional chefs and city
dwellers have certainly contributed to the cuisine, the heart of Italian
cooking is still found in the country’s fertile land and the people who have
farmed it for millennia.

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