Today cooking is quite an art. There are great chefs, famous restaurants, thousands and thousands of cookbooks, and millions of people who pride themselves on being able to cook well.

Yet there was a time when man didn’t even cook his food. The early cave man ate his food raw. Even after fire was discovered, the only kind of cooking that took place was to throw the carcass of an animal on the burning embers.

It was only gradually that man learned to bake in pits with heated stones, and to boil meats and vegetables by dropping red-hot stones into a vessel of water. Primitive peoples used to roast animals whole on a spit over an open fire. In time, people discovered how to bake fish, birds, or small animals in clay. This sealed in the juices and made the food tender. When we come to the ancient Egyptians, we find that they had carried cooking to the point where public bakeries were turning out bread for the people!

Greek civilization advanced cooking to a stage of great luxury. In ancient Athens, they even imported food from distant lands. And the Romans had magnificent banquets in their day!

Then, during the Middle Ages, the art of cooking declined and the only place where fine cooking was found was in the monasteries. When good cooking was revived again, Italy, Spain, and France led the way. These countries prided themselves on having a more refined taste than England and Germany, where the people ate chiefly meat.

A curious thing about cooking is that many primitive peoples knew almost every form of cooking that we practice now. They just did it more crudely. For instance, we cook by broiling, roasting, frying, baking, stewing or boiling, steaming, parching, and drying. American Indians actually knew all these ways of cooking, except frying!