Prehistoric curry - February 11, 2012

It was a cold one, and mostly I stayed home. I walked Anya as Ingrid and Daniel went off for a day of skating. Then I walked her in the afternoon, and finally at about 10 pm once the family had come home. In between I walked to a neighborhood restaurant for supper. I was chilly, sitting most of the day catching up on the household books, preparing for 2011 tax preparation season. The curry noodle soup was just the thing.

How long ago did people cook soup or stew? Pottery vessels were invented in east Asia during the last ice age, about 14,000 years ago. Ancient Britons were cooking nettle pudding 8000 years ago. A 4000-year old cooking pot with noodles still inside was found in China.

This is a long time after hominids began cooking food. There is disagreement, but it looks as though homo erectus was cooking food at least half a million years ago. Surely someone in all those millenia thought of heating up food in a gourd.

Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables. The Neanderthal Museum describes how food was cooked without fireproof vessels: a leather-lined depression in the ground is filled with water. Hot stones are placed in the water. It boils. Makes sense. And in ice-age climes, it must have helped keep the chill out of the bones.

I grew up thinking of Paleolithic folks as "cavemen," but really they did not live all that much in caves, and by the late Paleolithic, caves had become (at least in France and Spain) sacred spaces... hence cave drawings. Anyway, you don't want to be cooking very deep at all in most caves, as you can easily use up all the available oxygen.

No, the Paleolithic was dominated by nomadic life: what survives in terms of structures are glorified tents made of mammoth bones and skins. Cooking was probably done mostly outdoors, or maybe around a small middle-of-the-tent fire.

But I can't imagine a real modern soup or stew until hardened pottery vessels were developed, in the Neolithic. And the first curry? Still unknown... Can you imagine how they would have been received on a cold day during one of the ice ages?...