Cooking is the process of preparing food, by the analog skills, often with the use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training. Cooking can also occur through chemical reactions without the presence of heat, most notably as in Ceviche, a traditional South American dish where fish is cooked with the acids in lemon or lime juice. Sushi also utilizes a similar chemical reaction between fish and the acidic content of rice glazed with vinegar.
Preparing food with heat or fire is an activity unique to humans, and some scientists believe the advent of cooking played an important role in human evolution. Most anthropologists believe that cooking fires first developed around 250,000 years ago. The development of agriculture, commerce and transportation between civilizations in different regions offered cooks many new ingredients. New inventions and technologies, such as pottery for holding and boiling water, expanded cooking techniques. Some modern cooks apply advanced scientific techniques to food preparation.
Read more about Cooking: History, Ingredients, Methods, Science of Cooking, Home-cooking Vs. Factory Cooking
Other articles related to "cooking":
... Less spices are used than in traditional Indian cooking, with fresh spices and herbs for flavouring ... In some cases, cooking dough is spread over the container, like a lid, to seal the foods ... This is known as purdah (veil), but on cooking becomes a bread which has absorbed the flavours of the food and the two are best eaten together ...
... Cross-site cooking is a type of browser exploit which allows a site attacker to set a cookie for a browser into the cookie domain of another site server ... Cross-site cooking can be used to perform session fixation attacks, as a malicious site can fixate the session identifier cookie of another site ... an administrator password which attacker does not know, cross-site cooking could be used to fool innocent users to unintentionally perform the attack ...
... PAM is a cooking spray currently owned and distributed by ConAgra ... "olive oil", meant to impart the flavor of cooking with those ingredients ... and one containing flour suitable for dry-cooking as in baking ...
... Although cooking has traditionally been a process carried out informally in a home or around a communal fire, cooking is also often carried out outside of personal quarters, for example ... Bakeries were one of the earliest forms of cooking outside the home, and bakeries in the past often offered the cooking of pots of food provided by their customers as an ... "Home-cooking" may be associated with comfort food, and some commercially produced foods are presented through advertising or packaging as having been "home-cooked", regardless of their actual origin ...
... use a pig roasting box, the oldest and best known brand of which is "La Caja China." The cooking process is communal and usually done by men the host is helped by ... When the cooking is complete, the meat should ideally be tender to the point of falling off of the bone ...
Famous quotes containing the word cooking:
“I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage. “A servant of servants shall she be,” must have been spoken of women, not Negroes.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm, U.S. newspaperwoman, abolitionist, and human rights activist. Half a Century, ch. 8 (1880)
“You cannot make women contented with cooking and cleaning and you need not try.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“Reading any collection of a man’s quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won’t go away hungry, but it’s not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.”
—Christopher Buckley, U.S. author. A review of three books of quotations from Newt Gingrich. “Newtie’s Greatest Hits,” The New York Times Book Review (March 12, 1995)