The origins of cooking utensils

Cooking probably began hundreds of thousands of years ago, after a piece of raw meat dropped accidentally into a fire. Sometime after, utensils were invented to make the process easier.

• To avoid burnt and shrunken morsels, Neanderthal cooks took to burying portions of meat in the embers and baking tough vegetable roots on hot stones close to the flames.
• Carcasses were speared on pointed sticks, suspended between two forked branches and spit-roasted over the fire.
• Perhaps an early gourmet tried caking meat in mud or wrapping vegetables in leaves to help to retain their succulence.
• Nature provided the first cooking pots. Where molluscs or large reptiles such as terrapins existed, their shells made handy heatproof containers.
• Stomachs and hides of animals were widely used as receptacles and hung over the fire; this method of cooking, used during the fifth century BC by the Scythians, persisted in remote areas of Scotland until the 1700s.
• Around 10,000 BC, the first clay pots were hand-shaped in Japan; by about 3500 BC the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, who had fashioned cooking pots from stone a few thousand years earlier, were using turntables, or wheels, to throw pots, and utensils such as colanders.
• Finer sieves for sifting flour in breadmaking were made of interwoven reeds, rushes or papyrus.Metal cooking pots were devised in China around 1000 BC, in the form of the iron wok.
• Metal pots were known to Britons around the same time.
• The Romans manufactured pots, skillets and frying pans in factories.
• Most of the cooking vessels now common in kitchens were used in Romano-British homes of the first and second centuries AD.
• One notable exception is the kettle. The medieval "kittle" was simply a large pan with a lid, used for boiling water or food. Kettles with spouts appeared in the 1690s, but these were luxury items for those who could afford to drink tea. They were made in more affordable materials from the 1720s.

• The Romans were evidently pastry eaters. They made bronze bun tins and also used pastry crimpers to decorate bread and pies.
• Britain's first pastry cutters were created in the 1500's for gingerbread figures. Pastry boards and rolling pins appeared in the 1600's.
• The earliest known recipes date from ancient Egypt, written on soft clay tablets that were then baked to preserve them. A papyrus from about 1200 BC lists more than 30 different sorts of bread and cakes.
• Before the 18th century, when it came to describe profitable, poor-quality fiction, "pot-boiler" referred to big smooth stones heated in the fire and thrown into pots to cook food. This ancient method of transferring heat was still used in remote parts of Scotland until the early 1900s.

Fascinating, right? It's interesting to see how something as simple as a kettle -- something most of us use every day -- was invented thousands of years before. Remember this the next time you're cooking!

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