Read Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat for Free Online

thermal shock: in a poorly made pot, different materials expand at different rates as it heats up and the stress causes it to shatter.
    Most cooks experience thermal shock at one time or other: the dish of lasagna that unexpectedly snaps in a hot oven, ruining your dinner plans; the supposedly “flameproof” earthenware bean pot that shatters on the stove, disgorging its contents on the floor. Food writer Nigel Slater observes that it is preferable for a pot to “shatter into a hundred pieces than sustain a deep crack. The Cracked Pot might still be a favourite, but it introduces an element of danger I can live without . . . that uneasy feeling when you open the oven door that the dish will be in two halves, macaroni cheese sizzling on the oven floor.”
    We will never know exactly how the first pot was made. Pottery is one of those brilliant advances that curiously occurred to different people simultaneously in far-flung places. Pots suddenly become common around 10,000 BC, or a bit before, in South America and North Africa, and among the Jomon people of Japan. The Japanese word Jomon means “cord-marked.” Jomon pottery shows what artistry went into ceramics from a very early date. It wasn’t enough to make a good pot; it had to be beautiful. Having formed their pots, Jomon potters decorated the wet clay with cords and knotted cords, with bamboo sticks, with shells. Most of the very earliest Jomon pots seem to have been used for cooking: the surviving shards indicate deep, round-bottomed flowerpot-shaped pots, ideal for stewing.
    Strangely, the Jomon adoption of pots for food was not echoed everywhere. It used to be assumed that people started to make pots specifically for the purpose of cooking. But now there are doubts. How can we know whether people cooked with pots or not? Fragments of cooking pots will bear signs of scorching or mottling from exposure to the fire; they may even contain traces of food; and they are likely to be made from heavily tempered or gritted clay, fired low to eliminate thermal shock.

    In the Peloponnese in Greece there is a cave called the Franchti, from which more than 1 million pottery shards have been recovered, dating from 6000 to 3000 BC. This is one of the oldest agricultural sites in Greece. People here farmed lentils, almonds and pistachios, oats and barley. They ate fish. In other words, here were people who could really use some cooking pots. One might assume that those pottery fragments once belonged to cooking pots and storage jars. Yet when archaeologists examined the oldest fragments at Franchti, they found that they bore none of the telltale signs of being held over a fire. They were not sooty or charred, but highly burnished, glossy, fine ware, made in angular shapes that would not sit well on a fire. All the signs were that these pots were used not for food but for some kind of religious ritual. This is a puzzle. These Greek settlers had at their disposal all the technology they needed to make cooking pots, but they chose not to, preferring to put their clay to symbolic use. Why? Probably because no one there had ever used pots for cooking in the past, so it just did not occur to them to do so in this later era.
    Cooking pots represented a huge innovation. It took many hundreds of years of using pots as decorative or symbolic objects for the Greeks at Franchti to think of cooking in them. It is only among the later fragments, toward 3000 BC, that cooking ware becomes the norm. The Franchti pots become rounded and coarser in texture and are made in a variety of handy shapes for different tasks: stew pots of various sizes, cheese pots, clay sieves, and larger pots in ovenlike shapes. At last, these people had discovered the joys of cooking with pots and pans.
    The Greeks are perhaps the most celebrated of all potters. It’s easy to focus on the archetypal red-on-black and black-on-red show pots, depicting battle scenes and myths, horsemen, dancers, and feasts. But we can