The History of Grilling

Summer’s (almost) here and it’s time to start planning some great meals featuring grilled vegetables.  You can find just about all your veggie and fruit needs at our friendly weekly market, Pathfinder Produce, open every Thursday at the Pathfinder Village Commons from 2 to 5 p.m.

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Do you ever wonder how our earliest ancestors discovered how to use tools?  I sometimes do, history buff that I am, and have fun imagining the steps that they must’ve gone through to develop appropriate technology and techniques.  In some ways, each person goes through these adaptive processes when they learn how to use new tools to accomplish tasks they’ve never tried before. 

Lori Grace’s History of Grilling 101

•  In the beginning there was raw, uncooked food.  BLEH!
• One day over 1 million years ago near Lake Turkana in Kenya, lightning struck and resulted in a brush fire.
• Early man saw that animals fled from the bright flames.  He felt the heat on his face, but eventually overcame his fear of nature’s destructive force.
• The fire burned, and man noticed that the resulting charcoal kept the heat for a long time.
• An adventurer, he put some meat over the flame and hot coals to see what would happen.  It sizzled. It smelled great. It tasted even better!  (Or perhaps he came across a charred carcass after a brush fire and followed his scavenger instincts).
• After a few burnt offerings and burned fingers, he mastered fire starting, tending, and spit roasting.
•  He made the grilling of meat a standard practice, and showed the other hunter-gatherers how this neat trick worked.  Everyone raved over these tribal cookouts – food tasted so much better cooked!
• Some days, the hunting of game was terrible and the guys came back from the bush empty-handed.  Continuing along in their pre-kitchen cuisine adventures, the nomads decided to see what fire would do for vegetables.  Tough fibrous plants were transformed.
• With more experimentation (different methods, different ingredients, seasonings, and so on), the humble art of cookery was born.

In all seriousness, the adaptive use of fire for cooking resulted in tremendous consequences for early humans, according to this article from a few years back about the development of larger human brains and the need for calorie-rich foods.  In a nutshell, cooking allowed us to digest our foods more completely, and fueled our evolution into modern man.  More on the archeology of fire is at About.com. 

Of course, through the years, our use of fire for cooking became more sophisticated.  We expanded from roasting over open flames, to pit cooking, to frying and boiling in pots to control heat better.  We also discovered earthen ware (and later iron ware) could be surrounded by hot coals for slow, even baking.  We also used heat and smoke to help preserve meat for later use, according to the bbqguide.com website. Still later, we discovered how to build fireplaces and stoves that would provide the benefits of heat, while drawing the choking smoke from our living spaces.  Eventually, we developed safer iron and steel kitchen stoves that used different fuels – coal, kerosene, gas and electric – which divorced the soot and grime associated with more primitive methods from the actual cooking surface. 

But as we developed these methods, we also rediscovered that we like cooking outdoors.  The first charcoal briquette was patented just before the 20^th century by Ellsworth Zwoyer, and with the development of the automobile and the tourism industry in the 1910s, families would take to the open road in their flivers to recapture the thrill of living outdoors.  According to numerous websites, charcoal grills started to become popular after one of Henry Ford’s associates, EB Kingsford, started recycling scrap wood from car production into briquettes in the 1920s.  A comprehensive article on the development of grilling may be found at the Amazing Ribs website.  Returning GIs from WWII took to outdoor barbeques wholeheartedly, marrying the chore of cooking with the art of leisure as they moved into America’s suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s.  More on the development of modern grills is found at (where else?) Wikipedia.

Since those “Ozzie and Harriett” days of the mid-20^th century, medical experts have urged us to cut back on eating meat and focus more on fresh fruits and vegetables.  As we had developed a taste for sizzling and smoky-flavored foods, it was only natural to use methods devised for cooking meat and adapt them for vegetables.  Shish kabobs were easily integrated into modern cookouts (probably in the early 60s) as ordinary Americans’ tastes expanded from a strictly meat-and-potatoes diet.  From there, it was simply a matter of skipping the meat, then the skewer, and just placing prepared veggies on the grill rack. (Shish kabobs were first mentioned in a Turkish manuscript dating to 1377, and traditionally referenced medieval Turkic or Persian soldiers using swords to cook in the field.  A brief review of online articles indicates that kabob houses are now becoming very popular; kabobs are quick, healthy and very tasty).

Until next time, be well and enjoy some summer flavors!

Lori