The fish being grilled in the seventeenth-century German painting above were probably bought from vendors such as those shown in a detail from a Prague manuscript illustration (right). The merchants are checking and repacking herring, which were preserved in barrels of salt and brine during their transportation from the coast.
The Chinese, according to one account, first tasted roast pork when a pig trapped in a burning house could not be recovered until the flames had died down. True or not, it was by such felicitous accidents that the several uses of fire—tamed by humans around 500,000 BC—to make raw food more palatable were first discovered.
Baking was first carried out in shallow pits lined with hot embers or pebbles—a method still used in the American clambake. Boiling was facilitated by the development of pottery around 10,000 BC. Fire also enabled the preservation of meat by smoking; other preserving methods, including drying and salting, were familiar to the ancient Egyptians.
Often some techniques proved more applicable than others: The practice of fast cooking at high temperatures, for example, was probably first used in regions where fuel was in short supply. It was the constraints of climate and habitat that led to the development of specific local cuisines.
A detail from a fifteenth-century Flemish illustration shows servants passing a bread trencher—a thick slice of four-day-old bread shaped to contain food. Diners often equipped themselves with a stack of trenchers for each meal; when the bread became sodden, it either was discarded or given to the poor.
In this seventeenth-century painting, the family of a Swiss provincial governor gives thanks to God as food is carried to the table. Each diner has a wooden trencher and a knife, but only the parents and some of their sons have forks, which were still uncommon throughout Europe. A low table at the back bears a wine flagon and cooler; in a niche on the left is a cistern and a basin for washing hands.
World History
