Smoked food

From the cave to the backyard barbecue, smoked foods have a special provenance. What's your favourite?Smoking is a very ancient method of cooking offering food two main advantages: preservation and taste. Most anthropologists reckon hominids were roasting their food on home-built fires around 250,000 years ago, approximately 50,000 years before our species emerged. (There's considerable disagreement over both these figures.) All the food those creatures cooked would necessarily have been smoked as well: once a gazelle haunch is sizzling over your Palaeolithic Aga, your species can spend less time digesting and more on developing its brain. Cooked meat takes longer to spoil, heavily smoked meat longer still. So smoking was undoubtedly one of the most important things humans ever learned to

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