This ‘blog entry comprises both original material and extracts from the BBC’s brilliant radio series A History of The World in 100 Objects. I have italicised the bits I have plagiarised and hope the BBC and Neil MacGregor don’t mind.
We’re getting there in my meandering journey to answer the question I posed a couple of ‘blogs back – “why cook?” Of course I’m not asking why we should bother cooking more “why do we cook?” “Why cook? Why cook? Why not just eat?”
The single most important reason for cooking is not pleasure as some might think but energy efficiency. Here’s the thing. It takes, on average, 25% more energy for a human to consume and digest raw food as opposed to cooked. This is a massive effect in evolutionary terms. On the one hand survival is optimised as the advent of cooking means one has to find 25% less food to achieve the same results. But more importantly, on the other hand when there is no shortage of food the additional energy available can be put to good use powering the most energy hungry organ in the human body – the brain.
Now, this is not to say that the discovery of cooking is the only thing that differentiated early humans from apes. There is, for example, the small matter of a single knock-out gene that give the chimpanzee its cranial ridge and consequently massive facial muscle structure and powerful bite – and which is utterly absent in humans. Thus we have a weak bite but (and this is a big but) our brain case is not constrained by the massive muscle structures and has had room to expand without compromising our ability to function. Now; take a population of hominids without the brain constraint and give them a higher energy diet and leave to simmer for a million years or so…
Still, no one can be sure when cooking food, or let’s face it the discovery of fire-control first appeared. But there is evidence for when cookery might have first appeared. Last time I suggested we might be able to identify the first dish ever created by a human cook – and that was not barbecued meat.
Archeological Scientist Professor Martin Jones is an expert in the archaeology of food. “If we think of the human diet in two steps; one is with early modern humans there is an enormous adventurous diversification. We’re eating everything; we’re eating seeds, fish, birds, mammoths – anything that moves, we’re finding a way to eat it. Then there’s a second episode which starts around 10,000 years ago where we seem to home in on a small number of target species particularly grass seeds, what we call cereals, underground tubers and a small number of animals.”
About 8000 years ago the rains that fed the Saharan savannah began to dry up and it started to become desert. At around the same time humans learned how to tame wild cattle and manage and herd them rather than chasing them down one at a time.
Archeological evidence shows that around this time cattle were kept in villages, corralled in small numbers and butchered for meat. But many of the cattle were killed when they were old, too old to have been raised for food. The time taken to raise them to that age, plus the poorer quality of the older meat makes it highly unlikely that these were beef cattle. They must have been kept alive for other reasons. It is possible that they might have been used as pack animals but it seems more likely that they were tapped – for blood.
Blood gives essential dietary protein, in the context of a single animal it is a renewable resource, unlike beef. It is likely that the meat on the beasts was used as a fallback should other sources of protein fail or be used when the animal reached the end of its life. The meat was perhaps not the best thing to eat but it would always have been available as a last resort.
The, perhaps more obvious suggestion that these were early dairy cattle is almost certainly wrong. Not only did ancient cattle produce very little milk by today’s standards but drinking cow’s milk is very much a modern behavioural adaptation in humans. It is not something we evolved to do, nor do we have the body chemistry to do it well. For most of us our bodies have learned to tolerate cow’s milk but many humans around the world still have a severe intolerance.
So it is highly likely that one of modern humankind’s earliest sources of protein was blood. If one is to feed on blood rather one has a choice, fresh or not. It might not always have been convenient to drink the freshly-tapped blood immediately and the thing about blood is that it very rapidly ceases to be fresh. It will clot and dry and consequently one would need a way to store, preserve and subsequently consume it. If one mixes fresh blood with ground up cereals and bakes the resulting cake-like substance on a stone by the fire…well, of course, it’s black pudding. An easy way to preserve and store the most precious food resource.
It is very possible, then, that black pudding was the earliest dish created by modern humans.
The consumption of cooked food with its liberated energy sources was a key ingredient in making us what we are today.
Perhaps we owe more than we realise to the humble black pudding! All hail, by ‘eck, all hail!
