Culinary arts

Culinary arts refer to the skills involved in preparing, cooking, and presenting food, typically as meals. Those who work in this field—most often in restaurants—are usually called chefs or cooks, though the titles culinary artist and culinarian are also used. Skilled chefs are responsible for creating dishes that are both visually appealing and flavorful, which typically demands knowledge of food science, nutrition, and dietary needs. After restaurants, their main workplaces include delicatessens and large institutions such as hotels and hospitals.

The practice of cooking began with early humans around two million years ago. One theory, from anthropologist Richard Wrangham, suggests that primitive humans threw raw meat into flames to cook it. Another holds that they first tasted roasted meat after finding animals killed in forest fires, which was more appetizing and easier to chew and digest than raw meat. Cooking methods improved with the development of earthenware and stoneware, the domestication of animals, and advances in farming. In early civilizations, professional chefs primarily worked for kings, aristocrats, or priests. The separation between chefs cooking for the wealthy and peasants cooking for their own families helped give rise to many distinct cuisines.

In Europe, much of the study of culinary arts was organized by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously said, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are"—later simplified into "You are what you eat." Others contributed to understanding food science and gastronomy, and over time, deeper research into food and cooking expanded knowledge. In Asia, a similar path led to a separate study of culinary arts, which eventually merged with Western approaches. Today, in the global marketplace, the line between Western and Eastern foods has blurred, and culinary students are generally introduced to cuisines from many cultures.

In the Western world, culinary arts began to evolve as a craft and later as a field of study at the end of the Renaissance. Before that, chefs worked in castles, cooking for royalty, their families, guests, and castle workers. As monarchies declined, chefs moved their craft to inns and hotels, and from there it developed into an academic discipline. Before cooking schools existed, professional cooks mentored individual apprentices. The first cooking school in the United States, the Boston Cooking School, opened in 1879. It standardized cooking practices and recipes, laying the foundation for later culinary schools.

Tools, known as cooking or kitchen utensils, are essential to the culinary arts and are used by both professional chefs and home cooks. Professionals often refer to them by the French term "Ustensiles De Cuisine." These tools are made from materials such as wood, glass, various metals, and newer silicone and plastic. A wide range of cooking techniques come from different cultures and continue to evolve as they are shared and as technology advances. Different techniques require specific tools, foods, and heat sources to achieve desired results. Professional kitchens may use techniques that home cooks do not, such as operating an expensive professional grill.

Modern culinary arts students study many aspects of food, including butchery, chemistry and thermodynamics, visual presentation, food safety, human nutrition and physiology, international history, menu planning, and the manufacture of food items like milling wheat into flour or refining cane into sucrose. Training in culinary arts is available in most countries, usually at the university level, through government-funded, privately funded, or commercial institutions. Professional culinary programs offer curated educational and skills training over a three-year period at select universities and hotel or culinary schools.