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Bean Soup
1 cup navy beans 2 quarts water 1 small onion 2 stalks celery 1 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons butter Soak beans over night; drain and add two quarts of cold water. Add chopped celery and onion, also salt and pepper. Boil slowly for fifteen minutes. Place in cooker for four hours. Rub through sieve; add butter and serve. Use one radiator or cook a longer time.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a hard boil on the range, then sealed in an insulated box with a preheated iron or soapstone disk to coast for hours. A slow cooker or a heavy lidded pot in a low oven does the same work.
- The hingeThe fifteen-minute boil is not a formality — it is the only heat the soup ever gets from a burner, and it must be a genuine rolling boil so the sealed cooker starts as hot as possible. If you are using a slow cooker instead, still bring the pot to a boil on the stove first, then transfer.
- "One radiator"Fireless cookers came with soapstone or cast-iron disks heated on the range and set above or below the food. One radiator means less stored heat, hence the instruction to allow more time; the page does not say how many the four-hour timing assumes.
- Modern equivalentFour to six hours on Low in a slow cooker, or two hours at 300F in a covered Dutch oven, will bring soaked navy beans to full softness. Beans that are still chalky will not pass through a sieve, so cook until a bean crushes with no resistance against the spoon.
- SoakingOvernight in cold water, then drained and started in fresh water, as written — the discard is deliberate. Older beans may need a longer soak.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in two quarts is heavy by current taste, especially since the volume reduces very little in a sealed cooker. Start with half, and finish the seasoning after the soup is sieved.
- Rub through a sieveThis is a purée, not a broth with beans in it. A food mill on the medium plate is the closest match; a blender or stick blender is faster but leaves the skins in, which changes the texture from silky to slightly grainy.
- ConsistencySieved bean soup thickens as it stands and again as it cools. Hold back a little of the cooking liquid to thin it down before the butter goes in.
- YieldClose to the two quarts of water it starts with, since little evaporates in a sealed cooker.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1900 and the 1920s, when coal and wood ranges were hot, expensive and miserable to tend through a summer afternoon. The cooker was simply a well-insulated box — sawdust, felt or asbestos-lined — into which a boiling pot was locked with a heated stone or iron radiator; the food finished on stored heat, unattended, while the fire went out. Manufacturers and home-economics writers promoted it as a fuel economy and a labor saver. Dried navy beans were an ideal candidate: cheap, keeping indefinitely in the pantry, and demanding exactly the long gentle heat the box supplied. The principle never went away — the electric slow cooker of the 1970s is the same idea with a heating element replacing the hot stone, and the thermal cookers still sold today are the original box in stainless steel.