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Browned Beef Stew
2 pounds round steak 1 onion 3 cups water Seasoning Cut meat into small pieces. Slice onions and brown in some of the suet or two tablespoons of butter; add meat and cook until well browned. Add the three cups of water and seasoning; allow to boil slowly for ten minutes. Place kettle in cooker for three hours; thicken with four tablespoons of browned flour and six tablespoons of water made into thin paste. 3-pound chicken 1/3 cup butter 2 small onions
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a hard boil on the stove, then sealed into an insulated box to finish on retained heat. Everything about the method depends on the pot going into the cooker as hot as possible.
- The hinge: heat going inRetained-heat cooking works only if the pot is boiling hard, full, and heavy-bottomed when it is packed. A partly filled kettle, a lukewarm start or a slack lid means the stew coasts down through the 140-40F range for hours instead of holding hot. If you are not using a purpose-built fireless cooker with preheated radiators or soapstones, cook this in a slow cooker on low for 6-8 hours or a covered pot at 300F for about 3 hours.
- What a fireless cooker wasA wooden or metal chest packed with hay, excelsior, mineral wool or felt, with a tight nest for the cooking kettle. Better models included soapstone discs heated in the oven and laid above and below the pot. No fuel is used after the pot goes in, which was part of their appeal when fuel was scarce or costly.
- Round steakA lean cut from the hind leg, still sold as top or bottom round. It is the right choice for long moist cooking but has almost no fat, which is why the recipe reaches for suet or butter to brown in. Chuck gives a richer result if you are cooking in a modern pot.
- SuetRaw beef kidney fat, rendered down. Butchers will still order it, but two tablespoons of butter, beef dripping or a neutral oil does the same job here. Butter will brown fast, so keep the pan moving.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted dry in a skillet or a slow oven until it is the colour of cinnamon. Toasting weakens its thickening power, so more is needed than with raw flour, and it adds a nutty, roasted note. Toast it in advance and keep it in a jar.
- Thickening at the endThe stew comes out of the cooker below boiling. Return it to the stove, bring it back to a simmer, then stir in the flour-and-water paste and let it cook two or three minutes so the raw starch taste goes.
- SeasoningUnspecified in the recipe. Reckon on about 1.5 teaspoons of salt for two pounds of meat and three cups of water, plus pepper, added at the start; taste again after thickening.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat serves four to six. Vegetables are not in the list; carrots and potatoes can go into the pot before it is packed, since three hours of retained heat will not overcook them the way a hard boil would.
- The stray line at the end"3-pound chicken, 1/3 cup butter, 2 small onions" does not belong to this stew; it appears to be the opening ingredients of the recipe that followed, carried over in transcription.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens from roughly 1905 through the First World War, and it turns up as a full chapter in a great many household manuals of the period. The appeal was partly economy — a hay box burns no coal or gas after the first ten minutes — and partly the promise, pressed hard by domestic-science writers, that a woman could start dinner in the morning and leave the house. The technique suits exactly this sort of dish: a tough, cheap, well-browned cut that wants hours of gentle moist heat and cannot be spoiled by being left alone. Wartime fuel conservation campaigns gave the boxes a second push, and it is no accident that the electric slow cooker, arriving decades later, sold itself on very nearly the same argument.