It’s a marvel of history that any of us are able to cook at all
Here’s something we don’t marvel at nearly as much as we should. One day, who knows how many thousand years ago, an early human had the idea of gathering up wild seeds and turning them into something completely new. That person – we will never know who, or what put the idea into their head – became the very first human to make bread.
The oldest cooked food ever discovered is a 70,000-year-old piece of charred flatbread, baked by Neanderthals. It was found in a cave complex in Iraq, and has now been analysed by scientists at Liverpool University. They found that it contained wild lentils, pistachios and grass seeds, which had been ground together and soaked, and then cooked on a hot stone.
This is a pretty complicated, multi-layered process, which suggests Neanderthals were more sophisticated than previously assumed. It was probably arrived at through trial and error, across multiple generations. But even so, there must have been key moments of revelation during the invention of bread. Who was the first cave man, or woman, to hold up a sprig of foraged grass and think: I could make something out of this?
Before that, of course, someone had to light the first fire. And someone else, keeping warm in front of this new invention, must have had the mad idea of throwing their precious food into the flames, in the hope that it might improve the taste.
The history of food is full of such baffling ingenuity. Who was the first person to think, “This could do with a pinch of salt” – and how did they go about finding that pinch? Who first milked an animal of a different species, and what on earth were they thinking?
Although historians can tell us roughly when most foods were invented, the visionaries who created them have vanished into obscurity. No one knows who first thought to churn cream or whisk egg whites or boil cows’ hooves or extract isinglass from the dried gallbladder of a fish for the purposes of making jelly.
Syllabub – forerunner of the fruit fool – used to be made by milking a cow directly into a bucket containing a splash of cider, creating a sweet, frothy mix. It was probably invented by a milk maid. Her name is long forgotten, if ever it was known – but I salute her crazy genius.
The English Spelling
Society – set up in 1908 by a group of educational reformers, including George Bernard Shaw – has voted on a method for streamlining the English language. Under its proposed system of “traditional spelling revised”, redundant letters would be eliminated from words such as (k)night, snor(e) or – Beano-lovers beware – (g)nash. Spelling irregularities would be ironed out, and only one combination of letters approved for each sound. Thus, wash would become wosh, good would be guud, and cough would be coff.
All this is necessary, says the society, because our spelling has been mucked around with over the centuries by “scribes, printers, invaders and others”, so that it no longer matches the way we speak. “English spelling is broken.”
Broken? What a preposterous (pre-puster-us) notion (no-shun). English spelling is only enhanced by its oddities. I love the fact that it contains layers of history, like the rings of a tree. A flourish of French vowels here, some clattering Anglo-saxon there, a little Hindi or Yiddish to keep things interesting. It’s a mess – and all the better for it. follow read more