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Browned Soup Stock
4 pounds soup meat and bone 1 onion 2½ quarts water 1 tablespoon salt 1/2 bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 stalk celery 1 turnip 1 carrot Wipe the meat and cut it into small pieces. Brown about one third in a frying pan with a little suet and an onion. Place bones and remaining meat in kettle; add two quarts of water and allow to stand for one hour. Add two cups of water to the meat in the frying pan; boil one minute and add to the meat in the kettle. Add seasoning and diced carrots and turnips. Bring the entire mixture to a boil and allow it to simmer ten minutes. Place in the cooker for eight hours. Remove and skim fat from top before using. Use one radiator or cook a longer time.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a boil on the range, then sealed into an insulated box with preheated soapstone or iron "radiators" and left to coast. The stock itself is conventional; the equipment is what needs translating.
- The cooker and its radiatorsA fireless cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest with a nested pot well; heat came only from the food itself and, in models built for them, from one or two discs of soapstone or cast iron heated on the stove and set in beneath the kettle. "Use one radiator or cook a longer time" seems to mean that with a single disc rather than two, the pot needs a longer hold.
- Do not improvise the fireless cookerAn insulated box with no heat source drifts steadily downward, and two and a half quarts of meat stock sitting for eight hours through the 40-140F range is exactly the medium bacteria favor. Reproduce this in a slow cooker on low or a covered pot in a 200F oven, where the liquid stays above 180F for the whole hold.
- Soup meat and boneMeans shin, shank, neck or oxtail: gelatinous cuts on the bone. Four pounds of it to 2 1/2 quarts of water is a rich ratio and will set firmly when chilled.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, still sold by butchers but rarely stocked; any beef trimmings, or a spoonful of neutral oil, will brown the meat and onion just as well.
- Why only a third is brownedBrowning part of the meat gives the color and roasted flavor that name the recipe, while the unbrowned remainder and the bones contribute clean, gelatin-heavy body. Do not brown the lot unless you want a darker, more assertive stock.
- The cold hourStanding the bones and raw meat in cold water for an hour before heating draws soluble protein and flavor out into the liquid. It also means the scum rises in one manageable raft when the pot comes up to heat.
- DeglazingThe two cups of water boiled one minute in the frying pan is a deglaze; scrape the browned film off the pan bottom while it bubbles, or the best of the flavor stays behind.
- Yield and useAbout two quarts of finished stock after skimming and straining. Chill overnight and the fat lifts off in a solid cap, which is far cleaner than skimming warm.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the United States from roughly 1905 through the First World War, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a chapter of it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, while an insulated box with two hot soapstones finished the job on heat already paid for, without warming the kitchen in August. Long-simmered stock was the ideal candidate, since it asks for hours of low, unattended heat and nothing else, and stock in turn was the foundation of nearly every soup and gravy in a household that bought meat on the bone as a matter of course. Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the same practical school of American domestic-science writing; the fireless cooker faded once electricity made a thermostatically controlled low heat cheap, and it is best described as a functional forerunner of the modern slow cooker.