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Oatmeal
1 cup oatmeal 3 cups water : 1 teaspoon salt Stir the meal into boiling salt water; boil for five minutes and place in the cooker over night.
A fireless cooker was an insulated box, often packed with hay or felt around a soapstone or metal disc, in which food finished cooking on retained heat. The recipe assumes you own one; the technique translates to a wide-mouth vacuum flask or a heavy pot wrapped in towels, with one caveat noted below.
- What "oatmeal" means hereIn a book of this vintage the word most likely means steel-cut or coarse Irish oatmeal rather than the rolled flakes sold today, though rolled oats were also widely available by this period. Rolled oats tend to break down over a long hold; the 1:3 ratio and the overnight hold suit cut groats better.
- The ratio is tightOne cup of steel-cut oats to three of water gives a stiff porridge, stiff enough that cold leftovers could be sliced and fried, as was sometimes done in this period. For a spoonable morning cereal, four cups of water to one of oats suits modern taste better.
- The five minutes matterThat initial boil is not token cooking. It gelatinizes the starch and, more importantly, sends the whole mass into the cooker hot enough that residual heat carries it through. Stir the meal into water already at a rolling boil so it does not clump.
- Substituting a vacuum flaskPreheat the flask with boiling water, dump it, then pour in the boiling oatmeal and seal at once. A cold flask drops the temperature far enough that the oats simply soak rather than cook.
- Overnight holding and food safetyCooked grain held for hours at warm-but-not-hot temperatures is a known setting for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling and whose toxin is not destroyed by reheating. A well-preheated sealed flask holds heat far better than a pot wrapped in towels, but neither can be assumed to stay above a safe temperature all night; if the food is merely warm in the morning, discard it rather than reheat it.
- YieldAbout three to four cups cooked, serving three or four.
- Morning finishFireless oatmeal comes out thick and slightly cooled. Loosen it with a splash of milk or water over low heat and bring it back to a simmer for a minute before serving.
Fireless cookery had a serious vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, promoted in home-economics bulletins as a way to save fuel and to free the cook from tending a range. The insulated box suited exactly the foods that want long, gentle heat: dried beans, tough cuts, and above all breakfast cereal, which otherwise meant getting a coal or wood fire going before dawn. Coarse oatmeal, often said to have been a mainstay of the American breakfast in this period, genuinely needed an hour or more of cooking, so putting it up the night before solved a real domestic problem. The same logic survives in the overnight slow-cooker and thermos porridge recipes that circulate today.