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mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.
    A whole range of techniques opened up with pottery. Boiling was the most important, but it also became possible to use ceramic griddles to cook thin maize cakes, cassava cakes, and flatbreads; to use large pots to brew and distill alcoholic drinks; and to use a dry, lidded pot to toast grains, the most notable example of this being the popped maize of Mesoamerica: popcorn!

    People loved clay pots for another reason: the way they made the food taste. In modern times, we have more or less discarded the idea of a pot’s surface mingling with its contents. We want pots to be made from surfaces that react as little as possible with what is inside: this is one of the many virtues of stainless steel. With a few theatrical exceptions—the 1970s chicken brick, the Thai clay-pot—we do not consider the possibility that the cooking surface could react with the food in beneficial ways. But traditionally, cultures that cook with porous clay appreciate the flavor it gives to the food, a result of the free soluble salts in the clay leaching out. In the Kathmandu Valley in India, a clay pot is considered essential for pickle jars, adding something extra to mango, lemon, and cucumber pickles.
    Clay’s special properties may explain why many cooks resisted the next great leap forward: the move from clay pots to metal pots. Metal cauldrons are a product of the Bronze Age (circa 3000 BC onward), a period of rapid technological change. They belong to roughly the same era as early writing systems (hieroglyphics and cuneiform), papyrus, plumbing, glassmaking, and the wheel. Cauldrons started to be used by the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and the Chinese, by at least 2000 BC. The expense of manufacturing them meant that their use was limited at first to special feasts or the food of the afterlife.
    Metal cauldrons have a number of highly practical advantages over pottery. A cauldron can be scrubbed clean with sand or ash, unlike unglazed earthenware, which tends to hold the residue of the previous meal in its pores. Metal conducts heat better than clay, and therefore food cooks more efficiently. Most significant, a cauldron can be placed directly over fire without fear that it will shatter from thermal shock or get chipped. It might even survive dropping. Whereas archaeologists tend to encounter clay pots in the form of shards, they sometimes unearth cauldrons in their entirety, such as the Battersea cauldron in the British Museum, a splendid Iron Age specimen from 800-700 BC, which was pulled
out of the River Thames in the nineteenth century. It is a magnificent pumpkin-shaped vessel, constructed from seven sheets of bronze riveted together like a shield, that has survived in all its glory It is an awe-inspiring piece of equipment. Looking at it, you can see why cauldrons were often passed on in wills; they were weighty pieces of engineering.
    Once metal cookware was possible, it wasn’t long before all the basic pots and pans were established. The Romans had a patella—a metal pan for shallow-frying fish that gave its name to the Spanish paella and the Italian padella—little different from our frying pans. The ability to boil things in oil—which is really what frying is—added yet another dimension to kitchen life. Fats reach much higher temperatures than water, and food cooks quicker in oil than water, browning deliciously at the edges. This is the result of the Maillard reaction, an interaction between proteins and sugars at high heats that is responsible for many of the flavors we find most seductive: the golden crust on a French fry, a dark spoonful of maple syrup. A frying pan is a good thing to have around.

    The Romans