About the Book
A fireless cookstove is an insulated box. You heat soapstone or metal discs — the radiators — on the range, drop them in with the food, close the lid, and the retained heat finishes the cooking over hours with no fuel at all. Between about 1900 and the 1920s they were sold by the thousand.
This is the manual for the Toledo, Ideal and Domestic Science models, copyright 1920 by the Toledo Cooker Co. of Toledo, Ohio. Half of it is operating instruction — how to heat the radiators, when to use one and when two, how to read the radiator thermometer, how to clean the valve — and half is a book of recipes rewritten for the method.
Some of the directions here, particularly for canning in the fireless, do not meet modern food-safety standards; those pages carry a warning and the text is left exactly as printed.