Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking
Anderson, Everyone Eats.
Fraser, Empires of Food.
Higman, How Food Made History.
Jones, Feast.
Montanari, Food Is Culture.
Wrangham, Catching Fire.Boiling Water in a Paper Bag
Here’s an interesting exercise that simply shows how one can cook in an
animal skin. Take a large paper shopping bag, and cut out an eight-by-eight-
inch square with no seams. (Seams would cause it to leak.) Fold it in half
diagonally once into a triangle, and then fold it again in half into a smaller
triangle. Open it up so that you have a cone, and tape or staple the ends so
that it doesn’t unfold. Notice that one side will be thicker than the other;
that’s fi ne, it will hold water. Next, fi ll the cone halfway up with water, and
place it immediately over a burning candle. In a few minutes, the water
inside will boil, and the paper will not burn. This replicates the technique of
cooking in an open skin stretched over a fi re. If you have the patience, try
cooking a carrot in the boiling water.Pit Cooking
To get a sense of how people cooked in prehistoric times, fi rst fi nd an open
spot with soil soft enough to dig, at least 20 feet from any trees or buildings.
Dig a circular hole about three feet deep. Line the perimeter of the pit with
large stones for safety purposes and so that you can balance sticks across the
pit. Make a fi re inside the pit, starting with small kindling and building up
to larger logs. When they have burned down to coals, you can start cooking.
This is the original way to barbecue, incidentally.Culinary ActivitySuggested Reading