History of garlic in cooking

Garlic first grew in central Asia and it is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world.  It was grown by the third millennium BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Today is also grows wild in Italy and southern France.

Many of legends surrounding it have to do with strength, speed and endurance. Like onion, garlic as cultivated in ancient Egypt and it has been grown in European gardens since at least the sixteenth century. Egyptian slaves ate garlic as they built the pyramids.

The Roman legions introduced garlic to many of the peoples they conquered, especially those of Northern Europe.

Dating from 1600-1700 BC, the Yale Babylonian Tablet, represent the earliest known compilation of culinary recipes. The cornerstone of the Mesopotamian diet was the alliaceous plants, onion, leek and garlic.

The culinary home of garlic is southern Europe, and it also figures in folk medicines. It is the main ingredient of Four Thieves Vinegar, a legendry remedy that has been sold in France since the early eighteenth century.
History of garlic in cooking

History of baking powder

The first references to soda date back to the ancient Egyptians in 64 BC. The Egyptians were the first people known to use a rudimentary version of baking soda, called Natron.

In 1791, Nicholas Leblanc, French chemist and surgeon, discovered how to produce baking soda or sodium bicarbonate from common salt.

Bicarbonate of soda began to be used as a raising agent form the early 19th century and baking powder after that. The first use of baking powder began in about the 1830s.

In 1846 two bakers, John Dwight and Austin Church, established the first factory to develop baking soda.

Baking soda plus acid (initially cream of tartar) and starch resulted in baking powder. The first modern version of baking powder was discovered and manufactured by 1843 by Alfred Bird, a British chemist so he could make yeast free bread for his wife, Elizabeth, who had allergies to eggs and yeast.

It was further improved and formulated by Eben Horsford, who patented it as baking powder, the first calcium phosphate baking powder.

After the Civil War, American cooks started to use baking powder and other newly arriving and increasingly affordable ingredients.

In 1873, Marion Harland who wrote cookbooks Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery was one the first to include recipes for the kind of chemically leavened white cake and yellow cake commonly found at birthday parties.

Harland early on praised and promoted Royal Baking Powder. August Oetker, a German pharmacist made baking powder very popular when he began selling his mixture to housewife.

The recipe he created in 1891 is still sold in Germany as Baking. He stated the mass production of baking powder in 1898 and patented his technique in 1903.

The race of baking powder and baking soda companies to promote their brands, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, resulted in a few slanderous advertisements that depicted some products as ‘poison like’.

In 1889, Calumet Baking Powder was marketed as the first double-acting baking powder whose leavening began in the bowl and repeated in the hot oven.
History of baking powder 

How Did Cooking Begin?

How Did Cooking Begin?
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?

The History of Flour

The advent of agriculture changed the lives of the people. The Nomads started to settle, built villages and kept cattle. But even in the advanced civilizations the grains were still ground by hand between simple grindstones.

The Romans were no longer satisfied with this: in order to supply the growing urban population with flour they ground the corn on cone mills – massive, heavy structures turned by slaves or animals. And around 25 BC the architect and engineer Vitruvius described a water mill in which a paddle-wheel turned the millstones by way of a gearwheel.

This invention of the ancient world was used again by the millers of the Middle Ages, but in the twelfth century a new construction reached the European continent: the windmill, that probably originated in the Orient.

It is not known whether the Crusaders brought the invention home with them from the Arabian world. All we can say for certain is that windmills were already turning in far-off England around the year 1150.

Initially viewed with distrust, the new technology experienced its heyday in the Netherlands, where it contributed to growing prosperity towards the end of the Middle Ages. Until far into modern times the windmill was a characteristic feature of the European landscape.

That did not change until the start of the industrial age. In 1786 London’s first steam mill was erected on the bank of the Thames. Barges delivered the grain directly into the basement of the unimposing building. Inside the mill, two 50-horsepower steam engines together moved 20 pairs of millstones.

The Albion Mill was so productive that it provoked the resentment of its competitors. After five years it went up in flames, accompanied by the derisive howling of the London mob.

What initially met with little approval in England fell on fertile ground in America. There the inventor Oliver Evans constructed a steam engine that operated at higher pressure and was soon driving large automatic mills.

Scarcely anything in our modern mills is reminiscent of their predecessors from the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial mills now produce hundreds of different types of flour for every conceivable application, and in incredible quantities.

Every year, 320 million tons of wheat flour for human consumption alone run off the milling rollers. Wheat milling, especially, has become a global industry that bears a great responsibility. For the plant that was cultivated by the pioneers of agriculture over 10,000 years ago is now the staple food of a third of the world’s population – a bulwark between us and hunger.
The History of Flour