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learn just as much from their plainer cooking pots, whose story is less dramatic but no less interesting. Greek kitchen pots tell us what they ate and how they ate it, which foods they prized and what they did with them. The Greeks left behind numerous storage jars: for
cheese and olives, for wine, for oil, but above all for cereal, most likely barley: sturdy terracotta bins with lids to keep out the insects. Greek potters made frying pans, saucepans, and casseroles from coarse, gritty clay: the basic shape was the round, amphora-like chytra . They made little three-legged pots and handy combination-sets of casseroles and braziers, with the vessel and the heater designed in tandem. These were people who had more than one cooking strategy available to them.
    Pottery changed the nature of cooking in radical ways. Unlike baskets, gourds, and coconut shells—or any of the other food containers used before—clay could be formed into any size or shape desired. Clay vessels hugely expanded the range of food that could be eaten. To sum it up in one word: porridge. With clay pots, cooks could easily boil up small grains, such as wheat, maize, and rice, the starchy staples that would soon form the mainstay of the human diet the world over. Pots thus worked in tandem with the new science of agriculture (which also emerged around 10,000 years ago) to change our diet forever. We went from a hunter-gatherer regime of meat, nuts, and seeds to a peasant diet of mushy grain with something on the side. This is a revolution whose effects we are still living with today. When we find our largest pot and boil up a pan of slippery spaghetti, or idly switch on the rice cooker, or stir butter and parmesan into a soothing dish of polenta, we are communing with those first farmers who learned how to fill their bellies with something soft and starchy, deliberately grown in a field and cooked in a pot.
    In many cases, the clay pot enabled people to eat plants that would otherwise be toxic. An example is cassava (also known as manioc or yuca), a starchy tuber native to South America, which is now the third-largest source of edible carbohydrate in the world. In its natural form, cassava contains small amounts of cyanide. When inadequately cooked or eaten raw, it can cause a disease called konzo, a paralytic disorder. Once it was possible to boil cassava in a pot, it went from useless toxin to valuable staple, a sweet fleshy source of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin C (though little protein). Boiled
cassava is a basic source of energy in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, among other countries, usually eaten simply by mashing the boiled root to a comforting paste, perhaps with a few spices. This is classic pot-cooked food: the kind that warms the belly and soothes the heart.
    Casseroles are a pleasure to eat largely because of the juices: that heady intermingling of herbs and wine and stock. Right from the start, pots enabled cooks to capture juices that would otherwise be lost in the flames. Pots seem to have been especially valued among people who ate a lot of shellfish, because the clay caught the luscious clam liquor. Pottery is a great breakthrough for another reason: it is much harder to burn food than when it is cooked directly in the fire (though still not impossible, as many of us can testify). So long as the pot is not allowed to run dry, the food won’t char.
    The earliest recipes on record come from Mesopotamia (the site of modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria). They are written in cuneiform on three stone tablets, approximately 4,000 years old, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how the Mesopotamians might have cooked. The vast majority of the recipes are for pot cooking, most of them for broths and court bouillons. “Assemble all the ingredients in the pot” is a frequent instruction. Pots made cooking a refined and subtle business for the first time; but pot cookery is also easier than direct-fire roasting. It was little trouble to boil up