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Chicken Stew
Clean the chicken and cut it into small pieces. Heat the kettle and cover with water; allow to boil slowly for thirty minutes; season with pepper and salt, and place in cooker for six hours. Remove from cooker and add thickening. If desired, dumplings may be added and the kettle replaced in the cooker for thirty minutes.
A fireless cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a hard boil on the range, then sealed in an insulated box to coast down over several hours. Nearly everything here depends on that vessel, which almost no one owns now.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes fitted with preheated soapstone or iron discs, that held a boiling pot's heat for hours with no fuel. Nothing burns inside it: the cooking energy is whatever the pot brings in from the stove, plus whatever a preheated disc adds.
- The hinge: heat going inThe pot must be actually boiling, filled close to the top, and moved into the cooker immediately with the lid on. A pot that is merely hot, or half empty, will lose cooking heat quickly and the chicken will simply sit warm.
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low for 5 to 6 hours, or a covered heavy pot at 300F in the oven for about 2 hours, gives the same result with a heat source that does not fade. Do not attempt the six-hour hold in a cooler or a blanket-wrapped pot; a passive box that has not been engineered for it will drift below 140F and hold the stew there.
- "Kettle"Here it means the heavy lidded stewpot that fits the cooker well, not a tea kettle. Whatever pot you use, fill it nearly full so there is little air to heat.
- The birdThis is written for a stewing hen or fowl -- an older laying bird, tough and full of flavour, which is what six hours is for. A supermarket broiler of 3 to 4 lb is done far sooner; buy a stewing hen if you want the original texture, otherwise shorten the time.
- ThickeningUnspecified, as was normal. Roughly 2 tablespoons flour shaken smooth with 1/4 cup cold water per quart of broth, stirred in and simmered a few minutes on the stove to cook out the raw taste. Do this over direct heat, not in the cooker.
- DumplingsThe original returns the kettle to the box for thirty minutes; in a cooling insulated box drop dumplings may not set reliably. Safer to steam them on the stew over live heat, covered and undisturbed, 15 minutes -- lifting the lid collapses them.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt and pepper only in the original; an onion, a bay leaf, carrot and celery are period-appropriate and improve it. A 4 lb bird with dumplings serves 5 or 6.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement in American households between roughly 1900 and the 1920s, promoted in home-economics classes and in books like this one as a way to save coal, keep the kitchen cool in summer, and let a woman leave the house while dinner cooked. Commercial cookers were sold with nested wells and soapstone discs, and pamphlets encouraged building one at home from a packing crate lined with hay or excelsior. The logic is exactly that of the modern slow cooker and of the older haybox used across northern Europe: bring food to boiling, then insulate it so it finishes on stored heat. Chicken stew suits the method well, because a tough stewing fowl -- the ordinary fate of a hen past laying -- needs long moist heat and nothing else, and because it could be left in the box through a morning of other work.