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Pork Tenderloin
Choose thick tenderloin; split them, but not quite through. Make dressing of fine bread crumbs, salt, pepper and melted butter. Stuff tenderloin and bind together. Have tablespoon of melted butter in cooker kettle; add tenderloin and bake in roasting compartment one and a half to two hours.
This belongs to the fireless-cooker chapter, and it cannot be lifted out of that context and dropped into a modern kitchen. The method depends on equipment that no longer exists in most homes, and the combination of that equipment with stuffed pork is the reason this one should be read rather than cooked.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box, lined with insulating material such as felt, mineral wool or hay, holding one or two nested kettles. Cooking heat came from soapstone or cast-iron radiant disks heated on the range and packed above and below the food, or from the food's own boiling heat. Once the lid was shut there was no further heat input at all.
- The "roasting compartment"Presumably a well of the cooker fitted with heated disks above as well as beneath, so the surface of the meat would brown; the recipe itself does not describe it. However it was arranged, its temperature was never measured and began falling the moment the box was closed.
- Why this dish failsPork is asked to sit for one and a half to two hours in a container whose temperature is highest at minute one and lowest at the end. The recipe names no disk temperature, no preheating, no searing and no doneness test. There is no way to know that the interior ever passed out of the range in which Salmonella and other pathogens multiply, and a long, slow decline through that range is precisely the wrong direction of travel.
- The stuffing makes it worseBread crumbs bound inside a split tenderloin insulate the very centre of the piece. In retained-heat cooking the stuffed core is the last place to warm and the first to be under-cooked, and moist bread in contact with raw pork juices is a good growth medium in its own right.
- The cut has changedA modern pork tenderloin is a lean muscle of roughly a pound, far leaner than the hogs of a century ago and unforgiving of long cooking. Recipes of this period also sometimes used "tenderloin" loosely for a thick slice of loin, so the intended piece is genuinely ambiguous here.
- If you want the dishStuffed pork tenderloin is worth cooking; use a current oven-roasting recipe with a stated temperature and a thermometer target. Do not attempt to reconstruct the fireless method.
Fireless or "hay box" cookery, generally traced to Scandinavian and northern European practice, swept American household literature in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range could be lit once, disks heated, the box packed, and dinner left to finish itself while the fire went out and the kitchen stayed cool. Home economists promoted the cookers hard during the First World War as a patriotic economy, and manufacturers sold ready-made models with nested aluminium kettles and soapstone radiators, which is exactly the apparatus this recipe assumes. The method faded with the spread of thermostatically controlled gas and electric ovens, which delivered the same unattended cooking with a temperature you could actually read.