Cooking in Europe 1650-1850

This quip by the eighteenth-century Scottish biographer James Boswell defi nes the essence of humanity in a way his contemporaries would have found humorous but also thought provoking. It is neither an immortal soul reason nor powers of abstraction that separate us from animals but the simple ability to use fi re to transform our daily fare into something more palatable and nutritious. We are nothing more than cooking animals. Archaeological evidence bears this out; it is Homo sapiens our distant Neanderthal relatives whose sites offer the earliest incontrovertible evidence of cooking. From those distant times down to the present the food we eat and how it is prepared has become the decisive factor in the survival of both individuals and whole civilizations so what better way to approach the subject of history than through the bubbling cauldron? Growing and preparing food has also been the occupation of the vast majority of men and women who ever lived. To understand humans we should naturally begin with the food that constitutes the fabric of our existence. Yet every culture arrives at different solutions uses different crops and cooking methods and invents what amount to unique cuisines. These are to some extent predetermined by geography and technology and a certain amount of luck. Nonetheless every cuisine is a practical and artistic expression of the culture that created it. It embodies the values and aspirations each society its world outlook as well as its history.