I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.
Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.
I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you’ll get wine, in the right conditions.
Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.
Was beer really an accident? We were getting fucked up on fermented fruit for a long long long time before beer was a thing so I guess I always assumed we made that on purpose. But thinking about it I guess it makes sense that it was discovered on accident much like the fermented fruit.
Unlike fermented fruit, beer requires some processing by boiling the mash. I figure if someone was making porridge and forgot about it they’d end up with something beer-adjacent.
