You want fries with that?

  Part of the research I've been doing has turned up some stuff I thought you might find interesting so buckle up. It's all about early cooking techniques and it wasn't something I'd thought much about until I started reading. Firstly, before there was cooking proper, it is thought that food would be dried or heated in the sun. This may be ok for modern numpties on a raw diet but back in the day, further developments took place.

  We know that the big difference was mastering fire so it became a tool instead of something to fear. But then what?, there wasn't a range of saucepans available to knock up a delicious béchamel sauce on your induction hob. It looks like the first heat transfer was done by heating stones.

Old techniques still in use today

  Want to boil some water for a nice cup of tea? Drop a couple of stones in the fire for a while then plop them in a vessel of water. Hot chocolate before bedtime? Drop a nice hot rock in your milk and hey presto! (I'm pretty sure they didn't have tea or chocolate back then. -Ed.) But it got more sophisticated; fancy a nice bit of cooked bird? Heat a couple of large flat stones and squash the bird between them until tender. I'm almost daft enough to put a couple of paving stones in a bonfire on November fifth and squash a chicken in between just to see what happens, but I'd probably get sectioned.

​​​​​​​  As far a vessels go, metal wasn't a thing yet so pans weren't an option. Dug or burnt out logs could be used but it looks like there was also a fashion for using animal skins  tied between supports with small fires underneath to heat the contents. Think about that for a moment, if you were stuck in the wilderness there's no way you'd come up with that and if you saw some chimps doing that your brain would melt. Our ancestors were some smart motherfuckers to work this shit out. But it gets better, and when you think of the ingenuity of this, it's mind blowing stuff.

  There is evidence of hunters stuffing the meat from their prey into the dead animal's stomach then, with the stomach still in the ribcage, setting a fire under the ribcage so the bones burn and the meat cooks in the stomach. Not only is that amazing but it may sound familiar. Do you know why? Because that's a prehistoric fucking haggis! 

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com