Your question might be better answered in /r/anthropology? According to Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power, 1985) almost all premodern cultures combined foods according to a system of a primary starch and a supplemental flavouring food to make the starch, as you say, bearable.

Elaborate combinations of ingredients and dishes were always the prerogative of elites and royalty. In terms of the early modern West, major cuisines, like French and Italian, come out of cucina povera traditions, though adapted and codified by elite chefs working for elites. A major aspect of this was the publication of cookbooks--e.g. for France, much traditional cuisine is difficult for historians to reconstruct until a major wave of cookbook publication in the 17th century, by elites and for elites, which also disseminated both elite and poor cuisines across social classes and started to create the possibility of a unified, national cuisine.

Also one needs to distinguish between the culinary arts (which have problems of definition--does the art emerge through oral, familial traditions or in more formalized, text-based contexts such as cooking academies?) and gastronomy, particularly gastronomical writing, which, in the West, only emerges in the early 19th century with Grimod de La Reynière and Brillat-Savarin.

Pascal Ory, Le discours gastronomique français, des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1999)

Food : a culinary history from antiquity to the present, Flandrin and Massimo Montanari , eds., (NY, 1999)

Jean Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal, (Berkeley, 2007)