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Barley Mush
1/2 cup barley meal 1 teaspoon salt 2½ cups water Stir the meal slowly into the boiling salted water, being careful not to let it lump. Cook for ten minutes and place in cooker for eight hours or over night.
A fireless-cooker breakfast cereal: brought to a boil on the range, then transferred to an insulated box to finish overnight on stored heat. The whole method depends on getting the pot genuinely boiling hot before it goes into the cooker.
- Barley mealGround hulled or pot barley rather than whole pearl barley grains; period usage covered a range of grinds, from coarse grits to something close to flour. Modern barley grits or medium barley meal will stand in.
- The ratio1/2 cup meal to 2 1/2 cups water is 1:5, thin by porridge standards; a long hold in the cooker lets the grain absorb more water than the ten-minute boil alone would. Cooked through briskly on a burner instead, the same meal would want proportionally less water.
- No lumpsThe hinge of the recipe. Rain the meal into fully boiling water in a thin stream while stirring constantly; meal dumped in at once cements into knots that eight unstirred hours will never break up.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, holding one or two nested pails. Many models also took heated soapstone or iron discs set in with the pail to extend the stored heat. A heavy pot wrapped in towels inside a cooler is the closest analogue in principle; a slow cooker on Low reaches a similar result by continuous low heat instead of stored heat.
- Temperature driftAn overnight hold means the porridge spends hours drifting down through the range where bacteria multiply. Grain and water alone, salted and boiled, was the standard candidate for this method, but cooked grain held warm for hours can support Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling, so bring it back to a full boil in the morning. Do not use the method for anything containing milk, meat or eggs.
- FinishingIt will be thick and slightly gluey by morning. Beat it smooth over heat, loosen with a little boiling water or milk, and check the salt, which flattens out over a long hold.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups cooked, serving two generously or three modestly, with cream and sugar, molasses, or salt and butter.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1905 and the 1920s, promoted in cookbooks and by home-economics teachers as a way to save fuel and free the cook from watching a coal or wood range all morning. The principle is simply retained heat: bring the food to boiling, seal it in a well-insulated box, and let it coast. Cereals were the classic overnight candidate, since whole grains benefit from long gentle hydration and there is nothing in a pot of barley and water to spoil.