When Europeans were still consuming their food raw - and scavenging for their dinner - Armenians and other Middle Eastern Cultures were creating cuisines.
A.J. Liebling, an American journalist who lived from 1904 – 1963, once said that, in his opinion, “It would be difficult to say which is the oldest school of cooking – the Armenian or the Chinese. Both began when French cooking was a matter of a naked Gaul tearing at a raw rabbit.”
I have always loved that observation and, at times, wondered how truthful it might actually have been. Not just Armenian, but Middle Eastern cuisines in general are so incredibly old as to have their beginnings discernable only by archeological inference. Copper pots and wide griddles, finely wrought ladles; pantries, storage pots and all the evidences of a settled people and settled cuisines are found in ancient sites throughout the Middle East. And most date to a period when the rest of the Old World really was struggling with the most basic of culinary concepts.
The Middle East also had broad access to the spice trade of the Far East and to exotic ingredients from parts of the world that those early European would not even discover existed until Marco Polo journeyed to China in the 1200s. On top of that, the climate of the Middle East is extremely temperate, possessing the ability to grow just about anything someplace in the region – and let’s not forget that the earliest farmers were probably settled in the Middle East. All these things are the ingredients for creating an established cuisine.
The Chinese, likewise, possessed these attributes and they, too, created cooking styles and cuisines reflective of their many regions so early in history as to be uncertain as to when it all occurred.
Now, I’m not saying that, in time, Europe didn’t catch up – of course it did. But it all started in the Levant and in Asia.
