Rule 1 : Names do not matter
Don't get confused with names. They are diabolical inventions to ensure you remain puzzled. Do you honestly believe a half a foot long french name has any function but offer an excuse to rip you off ?
Let's look at a salad and a sandwich. Salad conjures up a certain image and Sandwich conjures up a dfferent image right? Now remove the crusts of bread from the sandwich. Has it become more like a salad? Or take any salad and place it between bread. Do you see the metamorphosis of a salad becoming a sandwich ?
Let us continue on the salad theme for a while. A soup is nothing but a liquid salad or risotto is nothing but a salad where rice dominates. Or if you think interms of sandwiches, risotto is a sandwich where rice takes the place of bread as a major imgradient.
Rule 2 : The basics can be learnt in a few minutes
Eat them raw.
If you are hungry, you can snack on many veggies, fruit, even eraw boiled pasta or raw cooked rice.
Now as most of us are'nt exactly starving when we sit for a meal, we need stuff slightly fancy to make it more edible. We learnt to heat foods to improve ther tastes. Now this heating can be done in many ways like baking, stirfrying, microwaving, frying, steaming etc etc. But the basic principle of heating ( or cooling ) food to improve its taste has'nt changes in a million years.
So if you cant eat the raw, you cook them.
The less hungry we are, the mre fancy the meal we demand. Maybe that explains why cleopatra drank pearls dissolved in vinegar. As we prospered, we grew less hungrier and went beyonf raw food to cooked food. Now the next step was flavor.
If you cant eat them cooked either, try flavoring them
A ton of spices have been discovered and cultivated with the sole aim of making foods palatable.
If you cant eat them still, try mixing a few stuff together.
If they remain inedible, probably mixing them with better tasting stuff will make them edible.
So I guess we went through four phases, each phase becoming shorter and shorter
Phase 1 : Eat 'em Raw
Phase 2 : Eat' em cooked
Phase 3: Flavor them
Phase 4 : Mix stuff together.
Fodstuffs and way of cooking the evolved in Different countries , in different ways, leading to the 'cuisines' we have today.