Test Your Culinary Knowledge

Culinary arts are the art of preparing, cooking, and presenting food, with people working in this field being called chefs or cooks, although the terms culinarian and culinary artist are also used. The primary workplaces for expert chefs are restaurants, delicatessens, hotels, and hospitals. The origins of culinary arts began with primitive humans roughly 2 million years ago, and the culinary techniques improved with the introduction of earthenware and stoneware, domestication of livestock, and advancements in agriculture. In early civilizations, the primary employers of professional chefs were kings, aristocrats, or priests. Much of the study of culinary arts in Europe was organized by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and in Asia, a similar path led to a separate study of the culinary arts, which later essentially merged with the Western counterpart. The culinary arts, in the Western world, as a craft and later as a field of study, began to evolve at the end of the Renaissance period. An integral part of the culinary arts are the tools, known as cooking or kitchen utensils, that are used by both professional chefs and home cooks alike. Within the realm of the culinary arts, there is a wide array of different cooking techniques that originate from various cultures and continue to develop over time as these techniques are shared between cultures and progress with new technology. Modern culinary arts students study many different 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. Training in culinary arts is possible in most countries around the world, usually at the tertiary level (university) with institutions government-funded, privately funded, or commercial.