Photograph by Michael Nichols, NG Creative
Kids, don't try this at home.
A Brief History of Cooking With Fire
For most of human history, over an open fire was the one and only way to cook a meal. People started cooking in this fashion nearly two million years ago, according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human—probably, early on, by simply tossing a raw hunk of something into the flames and watching it sizzle.
This may make modern chefs wince, but, Wrangham argues, it was likely a giant evolutionary step for mankind, providing us not only with tastier dinners, but with the extra nutrition and surplus energy necessary for generating big brains (see What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says).
By the Paleolithic era, 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, we were building primitive hearths in the form of a handful of stones in a circle—the sort kids today are taught to build in summer camp—and for the next many millennia such hearths, in various permutations, were the focal points of human homes. Our word focus—meaning the point at which all things come together—comes from the Latin for fireplace.
Until about 150 years ago, when the gas range came into common use, every household had a fireplace and every householder was obsessed with maintaining the kitchen fire. In the days before matches, if you didn’t keep the home fire continually burning, chances were you couldn’t start it up again. The medieval curfew—from couvre feu or fire cover—was a large metal lid used to cover the embers of the fire at night and keep them burning until morning. Nineteenth-century pioneers who woke up to find the ashes cold walked miles to borrow fire from their neighbors.
Starting a fire has never been an easy trick. No one knows how our prehistoric ancestors managed. They may have snatched burning branches from wildfires or generated sparks by rock-banging; some guess we may have acquired fire as a lucky off-shoot of chipping stone tools.
Otzi, the 5000-year-old Iceman discovered in 1991 by hikers in the Italian Alps, cautiously carried his fire along with him, in the form of embers wrapped in maple leaves and stored in a birchbark box. As back-up, he was also equipped with a fire-starting kit, consisting of iron pyrites, flint, and tinder fungus. The Neolithic technique seems to have involved grinding the fungus until it was fine and fluffy, then piling it in a mollusk shell, and striking sparks with the flint and pyrite until the tinder ignited. Tom Hanks would have given a lot for this while he was struggling to rub two sticks together in Cast Away.
Though an estimated three billion people worldwide still cook their meals over open fires, the closest most Americans get to the hands-on experience of fire-starting is the backyard barbecue grill. About 60 percent of barbecue grills sold these days are fueled with gas and so require no fire-starting skills at all. The rest are charcoal grills, usually fueled with charcoal briquettes, and traditionally ignited with a spritz of lighter fluid and a match. After the initial whoosh, the hopeful barbecuer waits until the coal-black briquettes turn ashy-gray, signaling the establishment of a heat-radiating bed of coals suitable for cooking hamburgers, hotdogs, chicken, pork ribs, and corn on the cob.
The inspiration for the charcoal briquette came from an early twentieth-century camping trip sponsored by industrialist Henry Ford. Each year from 1915 to 1924, Ford, with pals Thomas Edison, tire magnate Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs, took to the road in a convoy of six vehicles, taking with them chauffeurs, a chef, a refrigerated kitchen truck, a folding camp table for 20, equipped with a lazy Susan, dining and sleeping tents, and a gasoline stove. The group called themselves the Vagabonds.
In 1919, Ford—who was in the market for timberland to provide hardwood for his Model Ts—invited Michigan real estate agent Edward Kingsford to tag along. Within months of the trip, Kingsford had helped Ford to acquire 313,000 acres of Michigan timberland and to erect a sawmill and a parts plant. Both, however, generated a lot of waste, in the form of stumps, branches, twigs, and sawdust, which the thrifty Ford loathed simply leaving about, profitless, on the ground. To solve the problem, he adopted a process invented by Oregon chemist Orin Stafford, who had devised a means of making biscuit-sized lumps of fuel from sawdust, wood scraps, tar, and cornstarch. The lumps were elegantly dubbed charcoal briquettes.
Edison designed a briquette factory, conveniently located next to the sawmill; and Kingsford ran it, busily turning out 610 pounds of briquettes for every ton of sawdust and scraps. The briquettes weren’t popular: At first, they sold primarily to smokehouses. Then, in the 1930s, Ford began popularizing them, marketing “Picnic Kits,” each containing a handy box of briquettes and a portable grill, suitable for cooking lunch or dinner (“sizzling broiled meats, steaming coffee, toasted sandwiches”) while on motoring trips in a Ford Model T.
Despite Ford’s best efforts, the outdoor barbecue didn’t really take off until the 1950s, with the invention of lawns, suburbia, and the Weber grill. The Weber was the brainstorm of George Stephen, a welder, who spent his days at the Weber Brother Metal Works near Chicago, assembling sheetmetal spheres into buoys for the U.S. Coast Guard. At some point, he got the idea of slicing a sphere in half and giving it legs, creating a kettle-shaped grill that both kept the ash out of cooking food and allowed for far better heat control than the current store-bought grill models. It was such a hit that Kingsford immediately boosted briquette production by 35 percent.
For wannabe backyard fire-starters these days, most cooks recommend ditching the lighter fluid—it can give food an off-putting chemical taste—and using instead a chimney starter, an inexpensive metal cylinder that you stuff with newspaper (or potato chips), top with briquettes, and then set alight. Some suggest using hardwood charcoal in place of briquettes, since hardwood charcoal is made of nothing but hardwood (no chemical fillers), burns hotter, and gives food a finer smoky flavor.
Not recommended: the briquette-igniting technique ultimately lit upon by engineer George Goble and colleagues at Indiana’s Purdue University in the 1990s. The engineers enlivened annual faculty picnics by coming up with increasingly faster solutions for lighting the charcoal for the picnic hamburgers. They ultimately ended up with a bucket of liquid oxygen – the stuff of rocket fuel – which, when dumped upon 60 pounds of charcoal and ignited with a single smoldering cigarette, erupted into a gigantic fireball, reaching a temperature of 10,000 degrees F. It ignited the charcoal in three seconds flat. It also vaporized the barbecue grill.
Otzi would have been awed.
This may make modern chefs wince, but, Wrangham argues, it was likely a giant evolutionary step for mankind, providing us not only with tastier dinners, but with the extra nutrition and surplus energy necessary for generating big brains (see What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says).
By the Paleolithic era, 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, we were building primitive hearths in the form of a handful of stones in a circle—the sort kids today are taught to build in summer camp—and for the next many millennia such hearths, in various permutations, were the focal points of human homes. Our word focus—meaning the point at which all things come together—comes from the Latin for fireplace.
Until about 150 years ago, when the gas range came into common use, every household had a fireplace and every householder was obsessed with maintaining the kitchen fire. In the days before matches, if you didn’t keep the home fire continually burning, chances were you couldn’t start it up again. The medieval curfew—from couvre feu or fire cover—was a large metal lid used to cover the embers of the fire at night and keep them burning until morning. Nineteenth-century pioneers who woke up to find the ashes cold walked miles to borrow fire from their neighbors.
Starting a fire has never been an easy trick. No one knows how our prehistoric ancestors managed. They may have snatched burning branches from wildfires or generated sparks by rock-banging; some guess we may have acquired fire as a lucky off-shoot of chipping stone tools.
Otzi, the 5000-year-old Iceman discovered in 1991 by hikers in the Italian Alps, cautiously carried his fire along with him, in the form of embers wrapped in maple leaves and stored in a birchbark box. As back-up, he was also equipped with a fire-starting kit, consisting of iron pyrites, flint, and tinder fungus. The Neolithic technique seems to have involved grinding the fungus until it was fine and fluffy, then piling it in a mollusk shell, and striking sparks with the flint and pyrite until the tinder ignited. Tom Hanks would have given a lot for this while he was struggling to rub two sticks together in Cast Away.
Though an estimated three billion people worldwide still cook their meals over open fires, the closest most Americans get to the hands-on experience of fire-starting is the backyard barbecue grill. About 60 percent of barbecue grills sold these days are fueled with gas and so require no fire-starting skills at all. The rest are charcoal grills, usually fueled with charcoal briquettes, and traditionally ignited with a spritz of lighter fluid and a match. After the initial whoosh, the hopeful barbecuer waits until the coal-black briquettes turn ashy-gray, signaling the establishment of a heat-radiating bed of coals suitable for cooking hamburgers, hotdogs, chicken, pork ribs, and corn on the cob.
The inspiration for the charcoal briquette came from an early twentieth-century camping trip sponsored by industrialist Henry Ford. Each year from 1915 to 1924, Ford, with pals Thomas Edison, tire magnate Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs, took to the road in a convoy of six vehicles, taking with them chauffeurs, a chef, a refrigerated kitchen truck, a folding camp table for 20, equipped with a lazy Susan, dining and sleeping tents, and a gasoline stove. The group called themselves the Vagabonds.
In 1919, Ford—who was in the market for timberland to provide hardwood for his Model Ts—invited Michigan real estate agent Edward Kingsford to tag along. Within months of the trip, Kingsford had helped Ford to acquire 313,000 acres of Michigan timberland and to erect a sawmill and a parts plant. Both, however, generated a lot of waste, in the form of stumps, branches, twigs, and sawdust, which the thrifty Ford loathed simply leaving about, profitless, on the ground. To solve the problem, he adopted a process invented by Oregon chemist Orin Stafford, who had devised a means of making biscuit-sized lumps of fuel from sawdust, wood scraps, tar, and cornstarch. The lumps were elegantly dubbed charcoal briquettes.
Edison designed a briquette factory, conveniently located next to the sawmill; and Kingsford ran it, busily turning out 610 pounds of briquettes for every ton of sawdust and scraps. The briquettes weren’t popular: At first, they sold primarily to smokehouses. Then, in the 1930s, Ford began popularizing them, marketing “Picnic Kits,” each containing a handy box of briquettes and a portable grill, suitable for cooking lunch or dinner (“sizzling broiled meats, steaming coffee, toasted sandwiches”) while on motoring trips in a Ford Model T.
Despite Ford’s best efforts, the outdoor barbecue didn’t really take off until the 1950s, with the invention of lawns, suburbia, and the Weber grill. The Weber was the brainstorm of George Stephen, a welder, who spent his days at the Weber Brother Metal Works near Chicago, assembling sheetmetal spheres into buoys for the U.S. Coast Guard. At some point, he got the idea of slicing a sphere in half and giving it legs, creating a kettle-shaped grill that both kept the ash out of cooking food and allowed for far better heat control than the current store-bought grill models. It was such a hit that Kingsford immediately boosted briquette production by 35 percent.
For wannabe backyard fire-starters these days, most cooks recommend ditching the lighter fluid—it can give food an off-putting chemical taste—and using instead a chimney starter, an inexpensive metal cylinder that you stuff with newspaper (or potato chips), top with briquettes, and then set alight. Some suggest using hardwood charcoal in place of briquettes, since hardwood charcoal is made of nothing but hardwood (no chemical fillers), burns hotter, and gives food a finer smoky flavor.
Not recommended: the briquette-igniting technique ultimately lit upon by engineer George Goble and colleagues at Indiana’s Purdue University in the 1990s. The engineers enlivened annual faculty picnics by coming up with increasingly faster solutions for lighting the charcoal for the picnic hamburgers. They ultimately ended up with a bucket of liquid oxygen – the stuff of rocket fuel – which, when dumped upon 60 pounds of charcoal and ignited with a single smoldering cigarette, erupted into a gigantic fireball, reaching a temperature of 10,000 degrees F. It ignited the charcoal in three seconds flat. It also vaporized the barbecue grill.
Otzi would have been awed.
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/02/a-brief-history-of-cooking-with-fire/
I guess if the only reason you voted was the 2nd Amendment you would choose Huckabee according to this article
Jeb Bush's pro-gun conservative credentials suffered a blow on Tuesday as a Telegraph survey showed he is one of the only Republican presidential candidates who does not own a gun.
Of the 17 Republican hopefuls vying to lead their party into next year's election only Mr Bush and two other candidates do not have their own firearms.
Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, does not own a gun while Carly Fiorina, a former business executive and the only woman in the race, has six guns in her house but they belong to her husband.
Donald Trump owns a handgun. Here he is pictured receiving a ceremonial rifle at a military academy Photo: Getty Images
All the other candidates said they had at least one gun and many own several, with weapons ranging from handguns and shotguns to military-style semiautomatic rifles.
While Mr Bush is avowedly pro-gun on the campaign trail and supported gun owners as governor of Florida, the fact he does not have one himself may stoke the suspicions of some gun rights activists.
"That he doesn't even own a gun for his own protection strikes me as somewhat disconnected from the reality that many Americans face," said Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group.
Despite a spate of high-profile shootings across the US - and a spike in gun murders this summer - Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed to any new restrictions on guns in the US.
Politicians regularly pose with guns at campaign stops and tout their support from the National Rifle Association (NRA), the powerful gun lobby group that helped stymie Barack Obama's efforts to pass laws to combat gun violence.
Donald Trump lives in New York City, home to some of America's most stringent gun laws, but appears to own a handgun. His campaign confirmed he has a firearm but declined to give specifics.
Other Republicans were eager to share details of their personal arsenals.
Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina, said he owned about a dozen guns including an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle stamped with the insignia of the Air Force unit he once served with.
Mike Huckabee, whose recent book is titled God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, wrote that he bought his first .22 calibre rifle at the age of nine and now owns multiple assault rifles.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee Photo: Getty ImagesMarco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both senators, each own a .357 Magnum revolver while Jim Gilmore, a little-known former Virginia governor said he has four handguns and two shotguns.
Although Mr Bush is not a gun owner he has been bullish on gun rights on the campaign trail and a spokeswoman said he "has the strongest record on defending the Second Amendment in the entire presidential field".
Last week he said he believed the US government "should not be involved in gun laws" and that regulations should be left to individual states.
The Democratic National Committee seized on the statement and accused Mr Bush and other Republicans of "excusing the murders of our neighbors as the inevitable price we pay for constitutional liberties".
Mr Bush has used gun rights as a political cudgel to attack Donald Trump as he tries to bring the billionaire businessman's poll ratings back down to earth.
Mr Bush reminded Republicans of Mr Trump's 2000 book, The America We Deserve, in which the real estate mogul said he supported Bill Clinton's ban on assault weapons and said there should be "slightly longer" waiting periods for people trying to buy guns.
Mr Trump appears to have recanted his support for gun control and told NBC News that gun control laws were a "slippery slope" that would end in Americans' rights to bear arms being violated.
A 2010 list of gun owners in New York City showed Mr Trump had a carry business license, which allowed him to carry a concealed handgun as part of his work.
In order to obtain a carry business license, a person must prove there is valid reason for them to carry a gun at work and submit to an in-person interview by New York police.
It is unclear what reason Mr Trump gave to obtain his license but he could argue his public profile makes him a potential target.
Mr Trump said in July this year that he still has both a gun and a license but told a reporter it was "none of your business" if he ever used it.
Chris Christie, who does not own a gun, has done little to loosen gun laws in his home state of New Jersey and as a result is one of the NRA's least favourite candidates in the Republican field.
The gun lobby group gave him a C grade for his record on gun rights and he was one of two Republican candidates not invited to the NRA's annual convention earlier this year.
Correction: The NRA initially gave Marco Rubio's rating as a B+. They have since said that was wrong and his rating is an A. We have corrected the story and the graphic to reflect this.
Full list: Which Republican presidential candidates own guns?
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