If you haven't read about Mr. Marie-Antonin (Antonin) Careme, you really should. What an amazing character. His poor parents, suffering financially during the height of the French Revolution, and dealing with 25 kids (yikes!) put Careme on the streets to make his own way in the world when he was about 10 years old. He knocked on the door of achophouse and worked as a kitchen boy in exchange for room and board.
He picked up some skills there and then worked in a patisserie called Bailly's and then eventually opened his own pastry shop. This is where he started to do some wicked things that Parisians had never seen before, like making the Egyptian pyramid with pastry, sugar and marzipan. He really loved modeling his pastries after great architectural structures and displaying them in the window of his shop. That is where he really started his niche with elaborate centerpieces called
pieces montees. If the paparrazzi existed at the time, this is when they would have started stalking Careme. He became famous for those things and was essentially the first
Ah, where to begin on the subject of Cuisines in my own words? Well, to start, I'm just going to say that before there was "cuisine" there was just basic survival cuisine. Native Americans cooked with campfires, just like you see in those survival movies and shows. Often using stones to throw in a pot of water to bring it to boiling temperature and then using that hot water to cook root vegetables. And pretty much everything else was put directly on a fire. Thought they did seem to invent clay cooking pots that could withstand the heat of fire and made cooking a little more of art beyond mere fire roasting. Some Native Americans created adobe clam-shelled type ovens in the ground. I think the origination of Boston Baked Beans was done in one of these ground ovens. The recipe: 
