Introduction
Nowadays almost every single human being has a hobby or
leisure activity to relieve some of their stress, whether they do it daily,
once a week or even once a month. Leisure activities could be anything like
going to the spa, playing a certain sport or even cooking. Most people see
cooking as a labor or a chore that they must do daily to survive, however there
are some people who use cooking as a stress reliever, they find peace in
learning new recipes, experimenting with new flavors and improving their own
cooking skills.
There are many different approaches to cooking depending on
the environmental, economic and cultural traditions. Cooking techniques,
ingredients and recipes are also very different depending on the individual’s
cultural background, however there are some who choose to experience as many
cultural cooking techniques and recipes as possible, they do not limit
themselves to their own cultures type of cooking.
History
Nobody is sure about how cooking originated. The earliest
form of man may have tried their first cooked meal by chance, they may have
eaten an animal killed by a forest fire and found that it is more savory and
easy to chew than their regular piece of raw meat. They probably did not
deliberately cook food, but most believe that the primitive man used fire to
cook their food after they had discovered it gave light and warmth, however
there is no clear evidence to suggest that this was the case of how cooking
began. From whenever it began, however, roasting spitted meats over fires
remained virtually the sole culinary technique until the Paleolithic Period,
when the Aurignacian people of southern France began to steam their food over
hot embers by wrapping it in wet leaves. Aside from such crude procedures as
toasting wild grains on flat rocks and using shells, skulls, or hollowed stones
to heat liquids, no further culinary advances were made until the introduction
of pottery during the Neolithic Period.
Culinary techniques improved with the introduction of
pottery, the domestication of livestock, and the cultivation of edible plants. Man
then began to produce a more dependable supply of foodstuffs such as milk,
cheese and other dairy products. The roasting spit was augmented by a variety
of fired-clay vessels, and the cooking techniques of boiling, stewing,
braising, and perhaps even incipient forms of pickling, frying, and oven baking
were added. Early cooks probably had already learned to preserve meats and fish
by smoking, salting, air-drying, or chilling. New utensils made it possible to prepare
these foods in new ways.
In a time before the birth of Christ, man slowly but surely
began to further progress in achieving a more dependable food supply like the
cultivation of soybeans in China which predates recorded history and spread
from there to other countries in eastern Asia before the modern period, Lentils
had been discovered at a settlement site found near Lake Biel in Switzerland, Almonds
were found on the Island of Crete, Plant cultivation began in the Fertile Crescent
region of the Middle East, Mesoamerican people begin domesticating grains and
vegetables.
Man began an unstoppable advance on acquiring many different
food supplies and cooking techniques, especially in a time after the birth of
Christ, an example of such advances are the appearance oranges in India in the
first century A.D. from China, One of the first applications of metals was to
build a stove, the cultivation of coffee Arabica, Windmills were in use in
Persia for irrigation, Celery was cultivated from the wild, Kidney beans,
vanilla pods were introduced into Europe from the Americas.
Cooking
methods
There are many types of methods used to cook, however some
are more commonly used than others. These commonly used basic cooking methods
are divided into two general groups. The groups are: Dry heat cookery methods
and moist heat cookery methods. The cooking methods are divided into these two
groups because the heat used to cook the food is very different.
Dry heat cooking methods do not use water in order to cook
the food, the food is left dry and heat is applied to cook the food. Some examples
of the cooking methods are baking, steaming, grilling, and roasting. When heat
is applied to the food, the food cooks in its own juice or the water added to
the food during its preparation evaporates during the heating process and this
cooks the food. Heat is applied directly to the food by the flow of air around
it.
In the baking method
of cooking, the food is cooked using convection heating. The food is put into
an enclosed area where it is then cooked due to the flow of heat that is
applied to it.
Steaming food requires water to be added to a pot and then a
stand is placed inside the pot, the food is then placed on the stand and is
cooked by the steam rising from the pot below, there is no contact between the food
and the water from the pot, this method is most commonly used to cook
vegetables as it does not cause any loss of flavor and it minimizes the loss of
nutrients.
In moist heat cookery methods, liquid is used as a medium to
cook the food. Such medium could be water, coconut cream or oil. These liquids
are added to the food before heat is applied to it or sometimes heat is applied
to the liquid before the food is added into the cooking utensils to be cooked.
The moist heat cookery methods include: boiling, stewing, shallow frying, deep
frying, barbequing and basting.
Boiling is the most common method of cooking and is also the
simplest. Water is boiled to the point of boiling and the food is later added.
Unlike the steaming method, in this method the water is in contact with the
food. There are negative side effects to this cooking method, some of the side
effects are that the nutrients can be destroyed and the flavor can be reduced.
The stewing method requires the food to be cooked using a
lot of liquid. The types of food used in stew can vary from vegetables to meat
or even both at once. The liquid is slightly thickened and stewed food is
served in that manner. Stewing can also be used to prepare deserts by using
fruits instead of meats or vegetables. The advantage of stewing is that many
different types of foods can all be cooked at once making it very handy for
those still just learning to cook. The only disadvantage is that some of the
vegetables might be overcooked which may reduce the amount of nutrients in the
meal.
Conclusion
The most interesting factor about cooking is that it is
unlimited in terms of creativity, individuals can experiment with how they want
to cook their foods until the end of their days and some would take it as far
as saying that cooking is an art. I believe that cooking is an excellent leisure
activity that is not just fun to do but it is also a very handy skill that is
worth investing your free time to improve.
References
Christine Dell'Amore in Chicago (13 February 2009).
"Cooking Gave Humans Edge Over Apes?". National Geographic News.
W. Wayt Gibbs and Nathan Myhrvold. "A New Spin on
Cooking"
Cooking. (n.d.). Retrieved December 13, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking
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