Cooking technology

  Much of tonight's supper was cooked in a hot box modelled on one of the earliest bits of cooking tech invented by our ancestors. Once they had fire under control, different methods were found to apply the heat to the ingredients. Before I go on to the birth of appliances, there's another method I've come across from the natives of north america and Canada. It is utter genius so let me tell you about it. The easiest way is to show you this, a recipe from an ancient cookbook. 

  Take one medium goat and behead. Carefully fillet the carcass and pull the bones, meat and anything else you find in there out through the neck hole leaving an empty skin. Lightly chop up the meat adding whatever herbs and spices you happen to have come across while out hunting and gathering, and stuff back into the skin with a little water. Drop in a few hot stones from the fire, being careful not to lift them up with your hands to avoid a nasty burn. Leave to stew for a couple of hours, (if you've worked out what hours are and how to measure them), and serve with some boiled seeds of whichever grass you have growing nearby.

Haddock, cooked using ancient technology.

  Innovation was springing up all over the place independently. All sorts of things happened in different places but to keep this simple I'm going to condense it into one seamless story. Pits were dug in which fires burned for cooking. The pit could be used as an oven, a grill or simply to heat stones that would be used to heat liquid in a vessel.

  Sometimes, if the soil was crumbly, to stabilise the loose sides they would be smeared with clay. As the fire heated the clay it would harden but this wasn't necessarily the start of pottery as there are examples of early fired clay objects that were nothing to do with cooking.

  Sometimes bread dough was cooked by sticking it to the side of the hot oven, (which is basically a naan bread). The clay also made the holes water tight so they could be filled with liquid and heated with stones. Eventually, of course, clay vessels were used that were not sunk in the ground but you'd worked that out, along with the fact that multi purpose ovens are not a recent invention.

Kirk out

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