Today, Chinese cooking is famous all over the world, but of course it did not become famous suddenly. China’s civilization is very ancient, and the art of cooking developed together with it over thousands of years.

In the distant past, our ancestors ate raw meat. They did not know how to cook their food. When they killed animals, they often did not even take the skin off them before they ate them. Some specialists believe that it was forest fires that first introduced man to the art of cooking. Forest fires were sometimes started by storms, and people ran away from the burning areas and returned when the fires had gone out. When they came back, they found that the animals which were caught in the fires and could not escape were “cooked”, and that the cooked meat tasted much better than raw meat . From this, man began to realize that cooking made his food more tasty. He discovered different methods of making a fire, and began to collect pieces of wood to burn.

Gradually, the cooking of food became a universally accepted idea. The Chinese word “peng” (from “peng tiao”, meaning the art of cooking)comes from the use of fire in cooking.

So, in this way people had learned how to cook their food. However, they still did not know how to flavour ( 调味 ) it.

How did man first learn to use salt on his food?

One theory is that many years ago some people who lived in a coastal area killed an animal on the seashore. They left the dead animal there for some time. The salt from the sea-water covered the animal and when, later, the meat was cooked, it had a very good taste. In time, man learned to collect salt to flavour his food. The word “ tiao” means “ flavouring ”, which began with the use of salt.