240 pgs. color | $34.99 hardcover | W: Benoist Simmay; A: Stéphane Douay
I’m not much of a cook, but I love to read about food. Not books of gourmet recipes so much as considerations of the role played by food and its preparation in human history and culture. Whoever greenlighted Stéphane Douay and Benoist Simmat’s The Incredible Story of Cooking: From Prehistory to Today: 500,000 Years of Adventure must have been reading my mind, because it delivers just what is promised in the subtitle: a lively look at cooking and its role in history and culture from the emergence of the very first humans right up to the present day, ending with a glimpse into the future.
The Incredible Story of Cooking is full of fun facts and corrections to popular misconceptions, all delivered lightly and with a good sense of humor. Take those early humans (Australopithecus, followed by Homo Habilis and Homo Ergaster), for instance, who were primarily vegetarians, eating mostly plants and seeds supplemented with the occasional animal, fish, or fellow man, all of it consumed raw.
Things changed with Homo Erectus, whose diet shifted to primarily meat about 700,000 years ago, due to a dramatic decline in global temperature. Cooking, in the sense of preparing food with the aid of fire, began as an accident but became the norm during this cold period, as the heat from fire was necessary for survival but also facilitated different ways to prepare food. Heating your food has health benefits as well—some nutrients are better absorbed from cooked food, the heating process kills harmful bacteria and parasites, and food is more digestible when cooked so more of the energy available in the food benefits the person consuming it.
The Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 BCE, introduced a new way of living. In the Fertile Crescent, people began to cultivate and domesticate plants, giving rise to agriculture, which allowed them to live in one place and to have more control over what they ate. They also domesticated animals and developed sophisticated methods of food preparation and preservation. At about the same time, rice cultivation was developing in China and India, while in the Americas, people grew corn and potatoes as dietary staples.
As civilizations got more complicated, so did cooking, and some dishes from long-past civilizations are still familiar today. For instance, one of the staple foods in Mesopotamia was flatbread made of flour, water, and salt, which was mixed with all kinds of things including olives, fruit, honey, sesame, and spices. The Mesopotamians also brewed beer by fermenting barley, and individual households typically made their own supply. They even had bars, where everyone drank beer from a communal tank with a straw. Royalty, of course, had fancier food, including lots of dishes made with meat, and the Mesopotamians are credited with inventing the profession of chef.
With abundance comes choices, and some early civilizations created rules and customs about what they did and didn’t eat. In the Indus Valley, followers of the Jainist religion were strict vegetarians, in accordance with their philosophy of nonviolence and respect for all living beings. Judaism created their own set of rules, many of them pertaining to meat (fun fact: Adam and Eve were vegetarians until after the Fall). Islam also created rules about cooking and eating, including the halal requirements and the practice of fasting during Ramadan. At the same time, trading increased the variety of foods available in many regions, each of which adapted the new materials to suit their own circumstances and preferences.
Douay and Simmat continue their journey through food culture up to the present day, when most people have more choices than ever. You can consume the highly-processed products of the food industry for instance, or buy only organic food grown on local biodynamic farms. You can even roll the calendar back and eat an imitation of the Paleolithic diet, should that be your preference.
One of the best things about The Incredible Story of Cooking is how inclusive it is—European cuisines get ample coverage, but so do the those of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Douay’s bright and colorful art, which is at once both stylized and realistic, keeps the story lively, as does his use of a variety of frames and layouts. Word of warning: reading this book is like eating peanuts, in that once you start you’ll find it hard to stop. Extras include 22 recipes for everything from Roman Garum (a fish sauce) to Cincinnati Chili, and a bibliography. | Sarah Boslaugh
You can see a sample of the artwork for The Incredible Story of Cooking on the nbm web site.