The first ovens were pits for roasting mammoth 31,000 years ago
Long before bread, kitchens or even farming, people in Central Europe were cooking mammoth in roasting and boiling pits dug inside their shelters, around 29,000 BC. An oven, at heart, is just a hollow space heated in a controlled way, and that basic idea has carried humanity from hot coals to microwaves.
The early record is surprisingly rich. By 20,000 BC people in what is now Ukraine were wrapping food in leaves, setting it on pits of hot coals banked with ash and covering it with earth. At Mezhirich, each house built from mammoth bones had its own hearth for warmth and cooking. Clay ovens appeared inside homes at Çatalhöyük by 6600 BC, and by 4000 BC they were common across Mesopotamia, found at cities such as Ur and Eridu. By 3200 BC Indus Valley cultures were using ovens both for food and for firing bricks. Archaeologists prize earth ovens because they signal a settled community.
One ancient design is still in daily use. Bakers slap flat, unleavened dough against the hot inner wall of a cylindrical clay oven, a technique recorded in cuneiform texts. The Akkadian name tinuru passed into Turkish as tandır, with tanur as the Arabic and Hebrew form, and South Asians know a close relative as the tandoor. In rural Anatolian folklore, a young couple sharing fresh tandır bread stands for young love, though younger town dwellers increasingly buy their bread instead.
Medieval Europeans largely gave up earth and ceramic ovens, cooking in large cauldrons over fireplaces, much like a Dutch oven. Cast-iron stoves arrived in the early 1700s, and the nineteenth century brought coal ovens and gas. A dinner party hosted by Zachäus Winzler in 1802 was cooked entirely on a gas stove and in its oven, and James Sharp patented an early gas stove in 1826. Electric ovens came at the very end of that century but only became common once electricity supply improved, and the Swedish engineer Gustaf Dalén invented the heat-storing AGA cooker in 1922.
The biggest leap came in 1946, when Percy Spencer noticed the heating power of microwaves while studying the magnetron, leading to the microwave oven.
Source: Oven
