how did people cook back in the day when there were no clocks?

>>7324171
why do you cook with clocks?

Pretty sure their standards back then were much lower
So they just got by

>>7324171
>They used their Iphone
>They used the sun during the day and the star positions at night
>They put hte stuff in pots ignited the stove and cooked
>... Find a good restraurant around Big Ben, you can't. You see, the clock doesn't make the good chef!

We've had ways of telling time long before we ever did anything remotely resembling modern cooking.

>>7324171
Candles
You can tell how much time went by, by the amount of candle burnt

Nobody had anything to do. Thats why a lot of cuisines are time consuming and complicated. Its also the reason half the shit exists at all.

People had the time to spend making tons of things by hand and being unique about it.

>>7324171
There's always been some fancy cooking at some point, OP. The "spice trade" was when it got very interesting.

Enjoy this website that catalogs actual cookbooks from times past.
http://www.godecookery.com/

Enjoy this website which is a timeline of cooking going back to 15000BC.
http://www.foodtimeline.org/

You're welcome! It's fascinating stuff. And, if I recall right...it was brits doing that 15 birds stuffed inside other meats that preceeded that Tur-Duck-en craze of a few years past. A lot of what people do today is pretty new, but it can be surprising how advanced and complicated cooking could be when trade of both gadgets and far flung flavors were a big deal. Having people in houses who were "the cook" with lots of help was needed of course to influence things to the housewives.

Medieval cuisine 101:
>assemble your ingredients: grains (barley, oats), tubers (turnips), vegetables (cabbage, peas), meat (pork hooves, rabbit, squirrel, half-eaten sheep that the wolves got to), water
>put it in a big ass cauldron over fire
>boil it for 12 hours until it turns to a homogenous mush
>do 12 hours of field work for your vassal lord
>put some mush on a plate and scoop it up with bread
>keep the leftovers simmering and just add more food and water to it when it's about to run out
>repeat

>>7324171
Experience.

>>7324203
hey, you're a cool guy.

The chinese people used to use incest to tell the amount of time passed.

Just taste the food

>>7324409
>incest
I chuckled.

>>7324232
This doesn't sound pleasant

>>7324196
>nobody had anything to do before the internet existed

>>7324426

good because it's wrong

Women and servants were always in the kitchen, so back in the day it didn't fucking matter for them because they were stuck watching the food regardless. As long as they served some shit at sunrise and by sunset, and it was delicious, they were spared from the stockades.

>>7324171
By the sun obviously.

They counted the number of bongs of course.

>>7324196
>NEWSFLASH:
>Germany invades Poland!!!
>"Didn't have nuffin' to do" claims Führer
>Allies declare war
>"But I was booooored!" he complains

>>7324426
sounds peasant to me

http://medievalcookery.com/recipes/
not sure how faithful this is to the actual medieval cuisine but I've tried some recipes and they were really good

>>7324171
>Not judging whether it's done by the smell and the fork test.

>>7324463
Underrated.

They had clocks (sundials) as far back as Sumerian times. Before that recipes were either "cook all day, cook until noon, cook from noon until sunset" or the eternal favorite, trial and error (especially common in baking, see also "test loaf/cake").

>>7324171
What is an hour glass?

Seriously though, you're forgetting a key aspect. Something may take 30 minutes to bake at 425, but how do you know the temperature is 425? What if it's winter and it's incredibly cold and wood is limited?

Breads, meats, gravy, and stews have been standards forever. Breads are done when they're not gooey, meats are done when the color changes or they're warmer than room temperature(depending on who's making it) and stews and gravy are done once they bubble or boil for a while.

A lot of foods can be eaten raw. Food poisoning and diseases contracted from food storage or prep used to be much more common.

The question is too broad though, because you could mean anywhere from a giant stone wood burning stove from a castle to some guy with a couple pieces of wood, a hole in the ground, and large insects.