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Baked Potatoes (Wash and dry medium-sized)
Wash and dry medium-sized potatoes; put them in a pan and bake in the fireless for forty-five minutes. After fifteen minutes raise the cover quickly and allow the steam to escape.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, written for an insulated box heated by soapstone or cast-iron discs brought to a glow on the range and then sealed in with the food. Without that equipment the method has to be translated rather than followed.
- What the fireless wasA well-insulated wooden or metal chest holding one or two nests, into which preheated stone or iron radiators were dropped above and below the pan. No heat was added once the lid went down; the discs simply gave up what they had, so the temperature fell steadily through the cooking time.
- Radiators must be truly hotFor potatoes the discs were heated thoroughly on the range and used both above and below the pan. A single lukewarm radiator gives you steamed, greyish potatoes rather than baked ones. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- Oven equivalentIn a conventional oven, medium potatoes bake at 425F for 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance at the centre. This is an approximation only: the original works on stored heat that falls steadily, not a held temperature.
- Why the cover is raisedThe fifteen-minute venting is not optional. A sealed box traps every bit of moisture the potatoes give off, and the skins turn slack and wet. Lifting the lid briefly lets the steam go and the skins dry.
- Prick the skinsThe original does not say so, but potatoes cooked whole in a closed vessel should be pierced two or three times. Steam pressure inside an unbroken skin can split the potato messily against the pan.
- Medium-sizedAround 6 to 8 ounces each, roughly the size sold today as baking potatoes at the smaller end. Larger potatoes are likely to need longer than the forty-five minutes given.
- YieldOne potato per person as a side, two if the meal is otherwise light. The pan should not be crowded; the potatoes need air around them or they steam each other.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens from about 1905 through the First World War, and cookbooks of the period routinely gave it a section of its own, as this one does. The idea is generally traced to the Norwegian hay box, in which a pot brought to the boil was buried in insulation to finish on its own stored heat; American manufacturers improved on it with soapstone or iron radiator discs that could be preheated to well above boiling, which is what makes dry-heat baking possible at all in a sealed box. The appeal was fuel economy and, in summer, not lighting the range for an hour to bake a few potatoes. Home economics teachers and extension bulletins promoted the cookers heavily, and the fireless was apparently often built at home from a packing crate and packed excelsior. Cheap gas and reliable thermostatic ovens are usually credited with the category's decline by around the 1930s, and the technique survives mainly in the slow cooker and the insulated thermal pot.