Home › Fireless Cookery › Beef Stew
Beef Stew
2 pounds round steak 3 cups water 1 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper 1 carrot 1 turnip 1 stalk celery 1 onion Remove the skin from the meat and cut into inch pieces; place in kettle; add water and seasoning. Cut the carrot, turnip and celery into one-half-inch cubes and add to mixture; also the onion, sliced. Boil for ten minutes and place in cooker for three hours. Thicken with four tablespoons of flour and one half cup of water, well mixed. Serve on toast.
A fragment of a recipe: the vegetable list survives but the meat, water and seasoning quantities have gone missing from the ingredient column, as often happens with loose-leaf pages. It is a workable formula once you supply those and understand what a fireless cooker was.
- The missing amountsFor this quantity of vegetables, figure 1 1/2 to 2 lb of beef chuck or shin, water to just cover, and about 1 1/2 teaspoons salt with a few grinds of pepper. The original almost certainly specified these on the same leaf; do not read the silence as meaning no seasoning.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal box, sometimes with soapstone or iron discs heated on the range and set above and below the kettle. Nothing cooks in it; food arrives boiling and finishes on retained heat. The bare instruction to "place in cooker" assumes the reader owns one.
- The hinge: get it truly boiling firstThe ten minutes of boiling is not a formality, it is the entire heat budget for the next three hours. Bring the pot to a hard rolling boil, keep it there the full ten minutes, and transfer it to a thoroughly preheated cooker with the lid on at once.
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low for 5 to 6 hours, or a covered Dutch oven at 250F for 3 hours, does the same job with a controlled temperature. A retained-heat cooker will drift downward, and if the box is cold or loosely packed the stew can sit for hours at lukewarm temperatures, which is where trouble starts. If you use one, preheat it and do not leave the pot in it overnight.
- TurnipIn American cookbooks of this period "turnip" usually means the white turnip rather than rutabaga. Either works, but rutabaga is sweeter and needs the same half-inch dice to keep pace.
- The thickeningFour tablespoons flour whisked into half a cup of cold water is a slurry, not a roux, and it must boil to thicken and to lose its raw taste. Return the kettle to the stove, stir the slurry in, and simmer two or three minutes.
- Meat sizeInch pieces suit this cooking method; larger cubes are less likely to tenderize on retained heat alone. "Remove the skin from the meat" most likely means trimming the tough silverskin and fat from the outside of the cut.
- Yield and servingServes about four if you use the meat quantity suggested above. "Serve on toast" means ladled over thick slices of buttered toast in a soup plate; the bread does the work mashed potatoes or dumplings would do now.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1905 and the First World War, and cookbooks of the era not uncommonly carried a chapter on it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked all afternoon to hold a simmer, while an insulated box let the cook boil hard for ten minutes and then walk away. Commercial cookers were sold by mail, and magazines carried plans for homemade versions packed with hay, newspaper or excelsior. Beef stew is the obvious demonstration dish, since a cheap collagen-rich cut wants exactly what the box provides, long and gentle heat, and the recipe's insistence on half-inch vegetable dice and inch meat cubes reflects the one real constraint of the method, that nothing can be adjusted once the lid goes down. Electric ranges and thermostatic ovens made the technique redundant, and the slow cooker of the 1970s eventually took over its niche.