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Creamed Celery (Wash clean and cut into small)
Wash, clean and cut into small pieces enough celery to make three cups; place in kettle and cover with boiling water, allow to simmer five minutes. Place in cooker for two hours; drain and serve with cream sauce.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the celery is brought to temperature on the stove, then held in an insulated box to finish without further fuel. Everything hinges on translating that two-hour hold into a modern method.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box, wood or metal, packed with hay, excelsior or felt, into which a boiling-hot vessel was sealed to coast down over hours. Some models added preheated soapstone or iron discs; where none was used, the two hours are residual heat rather than applied cooking.
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low for about an hour, or a heavy covered pot in a 200F oven, gives the same gentle finish. A thermal cooker or a well-wrapped Dutch oven works too.
- Or just cook itThree cups of cut celery simmers to tender in 8-12 minutes. The long hold produces something softer and sweeter than a straight simmer; if you want that, use low heat, otherwise skip it.
- Cut sizeThe recipe says only 'small pieces' and gives no measure; slices of roughly half an inch are a reasonable reading, and finer cuts risk going stringy over a long hold.
- Cream sauceThe book's own cream sauce is not given here; a standard white sauce of the period runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, with salt and white pepper. Reserve some of the celery cooking water and use it in place of part of the milk for more flavour.
- SeasoningNo salt is mentioned at any stage. Salt the cooking water and taste again after the sauce goes in, since celery loses a good deal of its own savour to the water.
- YieldThree cups of raw celery cooks down to serve three or four as a side dish.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1905 and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a whole chapter on it. The appeal was fuel economy and safety: a coal or wood range was hot, expensive and demanding, and a hay-packed insulated box let a cook bring a dish to the boil in the morning and leave the house. Celery was an obvious candidate, being cheap and abundant in winter storage. Creamed vegetables under a flour-thickened white sauce were the standard genteel treatment of the era, and something of the technique survives in the insulated thermal cookers and slow cookers of later years, long after the hay box had fallen out of use.