Perhaps by accident, although anthropologists are still arguing about this. One theory is that an out of control fire burned down a hut and accidently cooked some pigs. People wandered in, tried the cooked meat and liked it.
Another theory is that a forest fire first roasted meat; still others think that cooking was a more deliberate, controlled act by humans. In any case, now there were more options than raw bar and tartare.
It was cooking but how about cuisine? Cuisine can be defined a self conscious tradition of cooking and eating, with a set of attitude about food and its place in the life of man.
So cuisine requires not just a style of cooking but an awareness about how the food is prepared and consumed.
It must also a wide variety of ingredients, more than are locally available and cooks and diners willing to experiments which means they are not constricted by tradition.
Since early humans were still eating to survive and had no control over their food supply, it was not cuisine.
Nobody knows exactly how people mastered fire and started cooking their food, we only know when - between 500,000 and one million years ago.
Roasting over an open fire probably the first cooking method. Pit roasting – putting food in a pit with burning embers and covering it - might have come next.
Then spit roasting, when hunters came home with the animal already on a spear and decided to cook it by hanging it over the fire and turning it.
With sharp tools, meat could be cut into smaller pieces to make it cook faster. Food could be boiled large mollusk or turtle shells where they were available, or even in animal skins, but pots were not invented until around 10,000 BC and there were no sturdy clay boiling pits until about 5000 BC.
Cooking in such vessels would probably have produced bacterial contamination, since there was no soap and no effective way to clean them.
How Did Cooking Begin?
