what is cookery

What is Cookery?

Cooking is one of those everyday words that everyone knows. But what does it really mean? Is reheating leftovers cooking? How about making an emulsified salad dressing? Scrambling eggs? Baking cookies?

At its most basic, cooking means applying heat to food. But cooking is as much about the ways heat changes the food as it is about the heat itself. That`s because heating food does more than just make it hotter. It changes the food in other ways, too.

History of Cookery

Think about this the next time you`re waiting for your burgers to cook on the grill: How was cooking "invented"? Today, all societies depend on cooked food, but when and how did cooking begin?

It`s an important question. Cooking played a major role in the development of smaller jaws and teeth, bigger brains, smaller guts, shorter arms, and longer legs, according to Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. He also believes that cooking is associated with females getting heavier and more fertile. That, in turn, changed mating and social behaviors. Instead of large males beating each other with clubs for the relatively rare privilege of mating, smaller guys mated more regularly and began to dine with the family more often.

There`s a lot of agreement among anthropologists that human ancestors were cooking their food as long ago as 250,000 to 500,000 years, but Wrangham and a few of his colleagues see evidence that cooks spoiled the broth as long ago as 2 million years. That`s about the time when our ancestors became less like apes and more like humans.

There`s more agreement on how cooking started than when. Most anthropologists think bush fires, started by lightning, baked or singed exposed tubers and other roots. Human ancestors tried the fired food and the rest, as they say, is history.
One of the big unknowns in this scenario is when our ancestors started to build their own fires. Many clues point to the conclusion that pre-people lit their own fires about 300,000 years ago, but much less positive evidence hints that they controlled fire a million and a half years earlier. Either way, use of fire for warmth, or to keep away large animals with sharp teeth, would have hastened the origin of roast roots and meat.