Pub. 8 2018 Issue 3

19 MINING FOCUS A HISTORY OF POTS AND PANS Using fire to cook food is something that people have been doing before recorded history. Once they knew how to make fire, the next step was learning how to control it and put it to work. Cooked food (especially meat) tasted better, lasted longer, and was easier to digest, providing a strong motivation for cooking at a time when meat had to be hunted and caught on a case-by-case basis. The discovery of metal and clay made cooking much easier, of course, because metal and clay conduct heat and are not destroyed by the cooking process. No one knows when these two important materials were discovered and put to work, but historians do know that naturally occurring clay was an easy first step because clay is an easy material to find, mine, and use. The first pots and pans were made from pottery. In fact, historians tell us that people have been using pottery to cook food since approximately 24,000 B.C. How long ago did people begin cooking over a fire? A cave in South Africa has evidence that fire was being used as long ago as 1.9 million or 2 million years. A hearth in Qesem Cave, located in Israel, is considered to be between 300,000 and 400,000 years old. The first cooking implements were made from things like sticks, shells, or animal parts. Around 7,000 B.C. , people living in Pueblo, Mexico in the Tehuacan Valley carved large stone bowls and set them into a hearth. A man named Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857–1900) observed Native American Zunis working with cooking baskets that they developed from mesh casings that had been woven to hold gourd water vessels steady. In 1881, he also saw the Havasupai fill roasting baskets with coals and cover them with clay. After they heated the roasting basket, they could then separate the basket from the clay and turn the hardened clay into a clay roasting pan. Stone boiling had problems, though. It took a lot of work and a lot of fuel to get the stones hot. Once hot, the stones often had ashes on them, and the ashes would get into the food and water. Earthenware was a good way to avoid these problems. New cooking methods were developed: blanching and boiling, for example, as well as simmering, steeping, and steaming. This is when people began to cook starchy foods such as corn, potatoes, and rice. Metal became interesting to early cooks who were looking for something more suited to cooking with direct heat. They started with copper. Cast iron dating back to 513 B.C. has been found in China, where it was used for cookware, figurines, and weapons. Europe began using cast iron cookware sometime around the 12th century when rich people bought it and put it to work. The most popular kind of cast iron cookware between the 15th and 18th century was the cauldron. Cooks used it for sauces, soups, and stews. Today, the most popular form of cast iron is the skillet because cooks can use it on the stove or in the oven. By the 1700s, kitchens had more metal cookware in them: baking pans, kettles, pots, pot hooks, skillets, and trivets had become more common. People continued cooking over open fires up until the development of the wood-burning stove, which happened in 1795 when Count Rumford invented the first cast-iron stove during the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840). The best metal for cooking is considered to be stainless steel. Today’s kitchens are filled with a variety of different pots and pans. Most cooks have strong preferences about what they prefer when cooking food, but whatever their preferences, mined metal is usually the main ingredient in their cookware. Metal pots and pans are as necessary today as they have always been. The modern world has changed in many ways, and many products have disappeared, but it is impossible to imagine a useful kitchen that isn’t well-stocked with its share of metal pots and pans, all of which are provided courtesy of the mining industry. X The oldest copper cookware dates back to about 9,000 B.C., where examples have been found in the Middle East. In addition to the Mesopotamians, who perfected working with copper around 4500 B.C., copper was used by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to make cooking tools, containers, and pots. They used copper cauldrons to wash, boil water, and cook food.