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Apricots
Wash the fruit carefully and allow it to soak in cold water over night. Boil slowly for ten minutes in same water; add sugar to taste and place in cooker for four hours.
This is a dried-fruit compote written for a fireless cooker — an insulated box that finishes food on stored heat rather than a flame. The method transfers cleanly to a vacuum flask, a slow cooker, or a heavy pot in a low oven, provided you understand what the cooker was doing.
- The fruit is dried, not freshFresh apricots need no overnight soak and would collapse in four hours. This entry assumes dried halves, a common pantry item at the time; much of the dried apricot trade was sulphured California fruit. Unsulphured apricots are darker and behave the same way in the pot.
- No quantities are givenA workable ratio is 1 lb dried apricots to about 1 quart cold water for the soak, which is roughly what the fruit will absorb plus enough to make syrup. Sugar "to taste" runs from 1/2 to 1 cup at that scale, depending on the fruit.
- The hinge: it must go in boilingThe hinge: it must go in hot -- A fireless cooker supplies little or no heat of its own, so the temperature the pot carries in is close to the highest it will reach. That is why the ten-minute boil is not a formality: hold it at the recipe's slow boil for the full ten minutes, cover, and move it to the cooker promptly rather than stopping to skim or taste.
- Keep it shutEvery lift of the lid costs heat that cannot be replaced. The original assumes four undisturbed hours.
- Modern equivalentsA wide-mouth vacuum flask, filled to the brim and preheated with boiling water, holds the fruit at temperature well for four hours. A slow cooker on low, or a covered casserole in a 200F oven, gets the same result in about 2 to 3 hours.
- Sugar timingThe recipe adds sugar after the ten-minute boil, just before the pot goes into the cooker. Sugar in the liquid draws water out of the fruit and tends to keep the halves firm, which may be what was wanted here. If you prefer them soft and jammy, hold the sugar back until the last half hour of cooking.
- Don't discard the soaking waterThe recipe boils the fruit "in same water," which keeps whatever sugar and flavour leached out overnight in the pot. That liquid becomes the syrup.
- Yield and servingA pound of dried apricots gives about 6 servings. Serve warm or chilled with cream, alongside cereal or a plain cake, or as a compote at breakfast — the usual place for stewed fruit in a book of this vintage.
Fireless cookery was a brief, serious enthusiasm in American household writing between roughly 1900 and 1920. The cooker was a box lined with mineral wool, hay, or ground cork, sometimes with soapstone discs heated on the range and dropped in beside the pot; food was brought to a boil on the stove and then left to finish on retained heat. The appeal was fuel economy and freedom from tending a coal or wood range on a hot day, and the technique was pushed hard during the First World War as a conservation measure. Dried fruits suited it perfectly — they need long, gentle hydration rather than hard heat, and they carry no pathogen risk. Apricots in particular had become cheap and widely available by this date, most of the American crop grown and sun-dried in California and shipped east in boxes, which is why a dish like this could appear in a general household cookbook with no note about where to find the fruit.