Cooking with Fire

it may not have been about taste... it may have been about preservation.

Raw meat deteriorates quickly
cooked meat does not.
Dehydrated meat does not
Frozen meat does not..( arctic shelf, ice age..etc)

I would think that may have been the beginnings of necessity instead of taste

my first thought exactly.

Probably dropped a piece of meat by mistake in the fire and it turned out to be better than raw.
Seriously how did they first find out about cooking food, baking and perserving food either salted or smoked?

I suspect they were trying to burn the carcass so as to not attract vultures and the smell of the burning meat appealed to their olfactory senses and caused them to take a bite whereas Grog said something like, "Hey, Throk! This **** tastes good when you cook it first!"

I remember in school, the teaching stating that the theory is fire was first discovered by lightening - like you suggested.

And I found a section from an elementary school textbook describing that theory.

http://www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/ElemInfo/HistoryE.pdf

Nice find, linkat. You are on the top of your game today.

I'm hot today!!

Nice to see you back, Tarah.

Wonder if this is just legend or lamb?

http://hannah.smith-family.com/?p=2127

Roast pig.
As people in the beginning lived in very different parts of the world and had no contact (?) as a rule how can it be that just the Chinese started with roast pigs?
In Africa they must have in some way also cooked food and we do not even know it meat was the first thing which was cooked or roasted it might as well have been vegetables or fish - fish layed out on stones heated by the sun and baked by the sun works. An egg you can fry on a hot stone.
Where did the native Indians on the American continent learn to cook -hardly by the Chinese.
What about the Europeans - did they bring the knowledge with them or did they learn it in Europe?

Thinking how long ago we learned this trick, isn't it a wonder how some people insist their meat still be bloody on the inside?

If you come to my house and ask me to took a $10+/lb steak "well done" I'm giving you tofu.

Thanks all for your thoughts. I guess cooking is like the wheel, a discovery and not an invention.

Good to be back, Letty.

I think shewolf is onto something with the comment about preservation but my own guess would be that preservation was a quickly discovered side effect.

Have you ever tried biting into a raw steak or roast and pulling off a piece of meat with your teeth? It isn't as easy as it sounds. Cooked meat tends to be much more tender which would have been fairly important for people that had no silverware and generally lost their teeth at an early age.

Hmm. Well they needed to stay by fire early on to stay warm at nights, and the day's kill would likely be kept close by to protect it from predators and all.

My first guess would be that they accidentally smoked some meat early on - one of the common and first ways to cook and preserve food.

It's not too hard to imagine some food sitting near the fire, the smoke getting blow and beginning to cure the meat...

Now I'm hungry.