Cooking with Fire

For most of human history, over an open fire was the one and only way to cook a meal. People started cooking in this fashion nearly two million years ago, according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human—probably, early on, by simply tossing a raw hunk of something into the flames and watching it sizzle. It not only enriched our culinary experience but also supplied the additional nutrition and energy needed to develop larger brains.