Cookware
In the beginning, there was cookware; pots and pans were a much later innovation. Nonetheless, food preparation is a very ancient art and science, its origins going back before modern homo sapiens had even appeared on earth. What follows is a brief history of cookware, pots and pans.
"Man - The Cooking Animal"
In a 1904 issue of The Dial, Waldo Ralph Browne pointed out that unique among animal species, only humans prepare their food by heating it using cookware, pots and pans. Browne went on to write: “What are parts of the Old Testament, of the Vedas, but cookery books? You cannot dip into Athenæus without realising what an inspiration food and drink always were to the Greek poet.”
Indeed, the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus contain very specific and complex laws regarding food preparation, known collectively as kashrut. The wife of an orthodox Jewish home is obliged to have two completely separate sets of cookware, pots and pans in order to avoid violation of one of kashrut’s central proscriptions against mixing meat and dairy products (Deuteronomy 14:21, et. al.). Many synagogues take this a step further by maintaining two completely separate kitchens.
Of course, this would not have been an issue for the earliest hominids who nearly half a million years ago had not yet learned to domesticate animals and create foodstuffs from their milk. The hominid species of that time, known to science as homo erectus (so called because it was once believed to be the first primate hominid to walk upright) was the first to actually control and utilize fire. It is not known exactly when one of these early hominids came up with the idea of roasting a piece of animal flesh, but archaeological evidence indicates such cooking activity was going on 420,000 years ago, with chunks of meat being roasted on sharpened wooden sticks that were the earliest form of cookware.
Pots and pans did not exist until the advent of pottery some 11,000 years ago. The idea of earthenware pots seems to have caught on independently in several parts of the world, appearing first in Asia and North Africa before cropping up in the Americas about 3,000 years later. Such pots allowed for the boiling of foodstuffs, expanding humankind’s food choices substantially, as some plants are completely inedible until boiled.
Frying is by far the most recent form of food preparation, originating in Egypt approximately 4500 years ago. It was not until then that metallurgy had progressed to the point that cookware, pots and pans capable of withstanding the high heat required for frying could be manufactured.
Although it looked different than those used in today’s kitchens, today’s kitchen implements are direct descendants of that ancient Egyptian cookware. Pots and pans used by modern chefs fulfill the same function they did at the time of the pharaohs.