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Rice and Figs
Cook the rice the same as Boiled Rice, adding just before placing in the cooker a cup of figs which have been washed, stemmed and cut into small pieces. Dates may be used in the same manner. 1 cup wheat
A fireless-cooker breakfast cereal: rice brought to the boil on the stove, then set into an insulated box to finish on stored heat. The method translates directly to a vacuum flask, a low oven or a slow cooker.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest into which a boiling-hot covered pot was set to coast down over several hours. Some patterns also used a soapstone or cast-iron disc, heated in the fire and slid under the pot, to add heat; others relied on the pot's own stored heat alone.
- The hinge: everything must be boiling when it goes inRice, water and figs should be at a full rolling boil in a hot covered pot, and the lid should not be lifted afterwards. A pot that goes in merely warm produces soupy, half-swollen grains.
- The stray "1 cup wheat"This looks like a fragment, plausibly the head of an adjoining recipe for cracked or whole wheat cereal rather than an ingredient here. It is safest to treat it as unrelated to the rice.
- The figsDried Smyrna or Mission figs, which come with a woody stem that must be cut off. Modern soft-pack dried figs need no washing but still need stemming; a cup is roughly 6 oz chopped. Dates should be pitted, which the original takes for granted.
- Modern equivalentsBoil hard for two or three minutes, then either seal in a wide-mouth vacuum flask for 3-4 hours, or cover tightly and hold in a low oven, or use a slow cooker on low, allowing longer than a stovetop pot would need. Overnight in a flask gives the breakfast the method was designed for.
- Yield and servingAbout four breakfast portions. Served hot with milk or cream and, if the figs are not sweet enough, a little sugar or maple syrup; the fruit was meant to do most of the sweetening.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the early 1920s, when the hay box or insulated cooker was promoted as a way to save fuel, keep a kitchen cool in summer, and let a woman leave the house while breakfast finished itself. The principle is old and often traced to Norwegian and German hay-box cooking, but the enthusiasm for it in cookbooks of this period was practical: coal and wood cost money, and gas ranges were not yet universal. Slow, gentle heat suits rice and dried fruit particularly well, since both want long hydration rather than hard boiling, and a fig or date cooked this way collapses into the grain and sweetens the whole pot.