Take a look at some cooking tips handed down the ages and the philosophy of food!
- Small, mud plastered ovens closely resembling present-day tandoors have been excavated at Kalibangan and the Indus Valley site.
- The earliest known recipes date from Mesopotamia in the second millennium B.C.
- There is evidence that as early as 12,000 B.C., Egyptian tribes in the lower Nile dried fish and poultry using the hot desert sun. Herodutus, writing in the fifth century B.C., describes how the Egyptians and their neighbors still dried fish in the sun and wind and then stored them for long periods.
- Fish preserving, depicted in the tombs of ancient Egypt, was so highly regarded that only temple officials were entrusted with the knowledge of the art, and it is significant that the Egyptian word for fish preserving was the same as that used to denote the process of embalming the dead.
- For thousands of years the survival and power of a tribe or country depended on its stocks in grain. Harvesting, processing, and storing grain stocks was of huge importance, and war was declared only after harvest. One of the earliest records of large-scale food preserving was in ancient Egypt, where it was enormously important to create adequate stocks of dried grain to insure against the failure of the Nile to flood seasonally. Huge quantities of grain were stored in sealed silos, where they could be kept for several years if necessary.
- 16th century London theatres evolved from the tradition of innkeepers offering street entertainers a place to perform.
- Archaeological evidence confirms that yeast was used, both as leavening agent and for brewing ale, in Egypt as early as 4000 B.C. Food historians generally cite this date for the discovery of leavened bread and the genesis of the brewing industry.
- In about 1300 A.D., Amir Khusrau notes that naan-e-tanuk (light bread) and naan-e-tanuri (cooked in a tandoor oven) were being served at the imperial court in Delhi. Naan was in Mughal times a popular breakfast food, accompanied by kheema or kabab.
- In the third-century Macedonia the earliest evidence of the use of a flat loaf of bread as a plate for meat is seen. This is a function which bread continued to perform in the pide of Turkey, the pita of Greece and Bulgaria, the pizza of southern Italy and the trencher of medieval Europe.
- The bagel is a Jewish bread, apparently originating in South Germany, migrating to Poland and thence to North America where it has become the most famous and archetypal Jewish food. Its name derives from the Yiddish word ‘beygal’ from the German dialect word ‘beugel’ meaning ring or bracelet. Because of their shape -with no beginning and no end -bagels symbolize the eternal cycle of life.
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