Vegetables and Vegetarian Dishes

Given the staunchly carnivorous impulses associated with barbecue, you may be surprised to learn that some of the first archaeological evidence of grilling involved vegetables. That nearly 800, 000 years ago, a prehistoric grill master (a human ancestor called Homo erectus) roasted olives, grapes, and barley in a campfire in what is now near the Israeli-Jordanian border. That more than 10, 000 years ago, Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers with minds and faces virtually indistinguishable from our own enjoyed wood fire-seared peas, acorns, and crab apples alongside the prodigious amounts of wild game that comprised the early human diet.