Home › Fireless Cookery › Dried Peaches
Dried Peaches
Wash peaches in cold water; drain and cover with fresh water; allow to soak over night. Boil slowly for ten minutes in water in which they were soaked; add sugar to taste and place in cooker for four hours.
A fireless cooker recipe: the fruit is brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in an insulated box to finish on its own stored heat. Everything depends on how hot it is when it goes in.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, sometimes fitted with a soapstone or iron radiator disc heated red-hot on the stove. Food went in boiling and coasted down over several hours. A modern slow cooker on low, a wide-mouth vacuum flask, or a heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a turned-off warm oven all reproduce the effect.
- The hingeThe pot should go into the cooker at a full boil, lid on, with as little delay as possible for transferring or tasting. Fireless cookery adds no heat; a pot sealed in well below boiling only cools further, and the fruit is likely to stay firm.
- Four hours means four hours undisturbedOpening the box to check vents the accumulated heat and slows the cooking sharply. If you are using a slow cooker instead, two to three hours on low after the stovetop boil should be enough.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Figure 1 lb dried peach halves and enough water to cover them generously, since they swell considerably as they soak. Keep the soaking water: the recipe calls for boiling them in it, and it carries sugar and flavor leached from the fruit.
- Sugar to tasteStart with 1/4 to 1/2 cup per pound of dried fruit, added after the boil as directed. Modern unsulfured dried peaches are darker than the sulfured fruit of 1900, so taste before you commit.
- Yield1 lb of dried peaches gives roughly 4 to 5 cups of stewed fruit — about eight servings as a breakfast compote or dessert sauce, and it keeps several days refrigerated.
- If the fruit is very dryPeaches dried hard, or long stored, may need a second short boil at the end rather than more time in the box. Test one half: it should yield entirely to a spoon with no fibrous core.
Fireless cookery was a brief but serious enthusiasm in American and British households between roughly 1900 and the 1920s, promoted as a fuel-saving answer to the coal range and marketed in patented insulated chests as well as built at home from a packing crate and hay. Its natural subjects were exactly this kind of dish — dried fruit, cereals, pot roasts, beans — things that want long, gentle, unattended moist heat. Dried peaches were a common item in cookbooks of the period, because home-dried fruit was a cheap way to carry a summer orchard through winter, and stewed dried fruit was a familiar breakfast dish. The technique anticipates the modern slow cooker, and hay-box cooking is still taught for fuel-scarce conditions; the electric appliance replaces stored heat with a trickle of new heat.