All the food processors in the world and the high-tech kitchen utensils available today won’t ever replace a mortar and pestle.
Why?
This two-piece device has been in use since the ancient times, and it’s not yet disappeared, so highly unlikely for that to happen in the future either.
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Why again?
Used all over the world, starting with the classiest of Mediterranean restaurants to the far off villages of Japan, mortar and pestle is the kitchen equipment recognized by people of all cultures as a quintessential element to cooking.
Doing things by hand since 35,000 years ago
Before the modern world introduced us to food processors and convenient electric gadgets, long before actually, people used their own hands to process food. They learned to grind and crush using their own strength and the force of stone and stone.
That’s how bread first started to be made, with grinding wheat using a mortar and pestle.
The earliest instrument, which dates from the Stone Age was a stone bowl accompanied by a stone pestle manufactured in a step-by-step process.
- I. The first in the series of steps to produce the object was to roughly shape it with a hammerstone. The hammerstone is one of the earliest stone tools to appear throughout Europe, North America and India.
- There is today Indian stone bowls that archaeologists have found to date to the Paleo-Indian period, from nearly 12,000 years ago.
- II. The following step in the process was to use another stone-instrument which had to be harder than the object-instrument to create an even, smoother shape.
III. The final step was to polish the object, and this was done by rubbing it against a mixture of sand and other abrasive particles. The object was placed on a large surface and polished until it resulted in a finely shaped and polished instrument.
When man first used a mortar and pestle, it was to grind grains
One of pestle and mortar’s first uses was of grinding grains, and there are people today who still prefer to prepare the grain using this device. Some Purists, for example, are known to make their morning porridge this way.
The earliest man produced flour by pounding a bulk of grains in the empty space of a natural stone. He removed the coating of the seeds by blowing them away. He then used the flour to make bread and rough cakes.
It was the first step into the development of mechanical action that would make processing food so much easier in the times to come.
So however primitive, that first process of grinding grains set the tone for specialized instruments in the future. And the next thing that developed after the mortar and pestle was the stamp mill.
Historians point strongly to the fact that mortar and pestle is one of the men’s most important discoveries because the instrument made it possible for people to eat food that, previously, had been inaccessible.
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So much of the food in the primitive era was inedible in its raw state, but using a mortar and pestle to grind it not only made it edible, but it also allowed man to expand the food sources.