Stew Meat?

[Bearcarver]

 
There must have been a time when all food cooking was done on, in, over or near an open fire so all of the food received at least some smoke during the cooking. Perhaps that is why nobody doesn't like smoked meat some of the time.

Yup----A long time ago!!!
[h3]How Did Cooking Begin?[/h3]
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.

 

[historic foodie]

Don't know who wrote that, Bearcarver, but it's filled with unenlightened speculation and erroneous assumptions of the worst kind---as bad as the myth that our forebears used spices to cover the taste and smell of rancid meat. Just weren't so.

Just one example, of many: A spear represents capital goods of the highest order. It's a precision tool that takes a long time to produce. In some cultures a boy made his first spear as a rite of passage into adulthood. In those places where atl-atls were used, spears were even harder to produce, because the two tools had to be balanced to each other.

Do you really think anybody was so lazy that they'd use one as a spit, and chance damaging it? Not hardly!

 

[ameskimo1]

I don't know, I wasn't there. But happy someone figured it out long before God graced me on this planet!

 

[Bearcarver]

LOL----The article I posted said nothing about using spices to cover the taste of rancid meat.

Also the article is talking about people starting to cook their food somewhere between 500,000 years ago & 1million years ago.

Then goes on to mention that pots were not invented until around 10,000 BC.

So I doubt if people in those earliest days were worried about having 2 tools that were balanced to each other.

The use of spears dates back 400,000 years, but the use of the atlati you speak of goes no farther back than 21,000 years ago.

None of this has anything to do with my reason for posting the article. I posted it to say cooking with fire in one form or another started somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million years BC, which in my book is a long time ago. I only posted the whole article because you can't post links, and I didn't want to take 2 sentences out of context.

This was an answer to a comment about cooking with fire, and wasn't meant to be a statement of scientific exacting fact. Lighten up.

I'm done with this topic.

Bear

 

[superdave]

I guess I'll start a new thread when the meat goes in the smoker.  LOL!!! 

BTW, it is super foggy here today so should be an interesting smoke. 

 

[red dog]

Yah, lighten up. I made a spear last summer and it took me about 5 minutes. I killed a hotdog with it and used it to roast it on an open fire. Then I threw it in the fire. I'll make another one next time I want to kill a hotdog.

 

[gary s]

Well said Bear,  I got what you were responding to. 

Gary