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Creamed Potatoes (Wash and pare the potatoes cut)
Wash and pare the potatoes; cut into one-half-inch cubes; place in kettle and cover with. boiling salted water. Boil three minutes and place in cooker for forty-five minutes. Drain and cover with cream sauce. Large amounts of potatoes may be cooked in the cooker in this way without danger of their breaking.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in an insulated box to finish on its own stored heat. The method still works, but it depends entirely on the pot going in genuinely boiling and the insulation being good.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal chest packed with felt, excelsior or asbestos, often with a soapstone or iron disc heated red-hot on the range and laid under the kettle. It is the same principle as a haybox or a modern thermal cooker. A heavy lidded pot wrapped in towels inside a small cooler approximates it.
- The hinge: go in boilingThe three minutes on the stove is not cooking time, it is the heat charge for the next forty-five. The kettle should be at a full rolling boil with the lid on as it enters the cooker; a pot that goes in merely hot will lose heat faster than the potatoes can absorb it, and they will come out underdone.
- Fill the kettleRetained-heat cooking scales upward, not downward. A nearly full kettle holds its temperature; a quarter-full one loses it fast. This is why the recipe boasts about large amounts.
- Cube size mattersHalf-inch dice is not decorative. Larger pieces will not cook through on stored heat alone, and the note about potatoes not breaking depends on their never being agitated by a boil.
- Cream sauceThe recipe gives no proportions. A common period medium white sauce is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup of cream or milk, cooked smooth and seasoned. Have it made and hot before the potatoes come out of the cooker.
- If you skip the cookerSimmer the cubes 12-15 minutes in salted water until a knife meets no resistance, then drain and sauce them. The fireless method saves fuel and attention, not time.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 1/3 lb of potatoes per person as a side dish, and a cup of sauce for every 2 lb of potatoes.
Fireless cookery had its own chapter in many American cookbooks between roughly 1905 and 1920, when home economists and fuel-conservation campaigns promoted the insulated box as a way to cook a dinner while the range sat cold. The idea is much older than the appliance -- the haybox, a pot buried in insulating straw and long associated with Norwegian practice, is generally cited as its ancestor -- but the commercial fireless cooker, sold as a piece of furniture with soapstone radiators, belongs squarely to the era of coal and wood stoves that were expensive to keep burning through a summer afternoon. Potatoes suited the method because the gentle, motionless heat left the cubes whole; the boast about cooking large amounts "without danger of their breaking" suggests a cook working at scale.