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Roast Beef
The best shaped roast to cook in the fireless is a rolled roast of five to eight pounds. Use whatever seasoning you are accustomed to and prepare in the usual way for the oven. Put the roast in the largest vessel, and if the roast is large, raise the temperature of the two radiators to the highest possible point; then place the vessel in the large compartment and allow it to remain on the program of twenty minutes for each pound of roast, or three minutes less per pound if the roast is desired rare.
This belongs to the fireless-cooker chapter, and it only makes sense if you know what that appliance was. It is worth reading as a document of a lost cooking method rather than as instructions to follow.
- What the "fireless" wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest lined with felt, mineral wool or ground cork, holding one or more nesting vessels. Nothing in it produced heat; the box simply slowed the loss of heat already put into the food and into the radiators.
- The radiatorsDiscs of soapstone or cast iron heated on the range or in the oven until very hot, then set above and below the cooking vessel. "Raise the temperature of the two radiators to the highest possible point" means heat them until they are as hot as your stove will make them, which is neither measured nor repeatable.
- "The program"A printed timing table in the book, not a setting on a dial. Twenty minutes per pound means the box stays shut for that long with no heat added — a 7 lb roast sits for more than two hours on a temperature curve that is falling the whole time.
- Why this fails on temperatureThe heat in the box is finite and decreasing. There is no way to know what the interior of the meat reached, and no instruction to check; the whole method depends on faith in a table. Roasting temperature is never verified at any point.
- Why a rolled roast is the worst case hereRolling and tying moves what was the outer surface of the meat, where bacteria live, into the centre. A rolled roast has to reach a safe internal temperature throughout, exactly the thing a retained-heat box cannot demonstrate.
- The long slow driftLarge cuts held for hours in a container whose temperature is falling can spend a considerable stretch in the range where bacteria multiply, and no amount of subsequent resting corrects that. Use a current roasting method with a thermometer instead.
Fireless cookers were a serious enthusiasm in American households roughly from the 1900s through the 1920s, sold commercially as the Caloric and similar brands and also built at home from a packing case, newspaper and hay — the "hay box" of European kitchens. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range was hot, expensive and miserable in summer, and a cooker that borrowed a short spell of stove heat and then ran on insulation for the remaining hours saved both. Loose-leaf cook books of this era, sold in binders so pages could be added or swapped, sometimes carried a fireless chapter alongside conventional ranges, with timing tables for each cut. The method survives in reduced form in the thermal cookers still common in East Asia and in the retained-heat cooking of a heavy covered pot, but the large-roast applications were quietly dropped, a decline usually attributed to home refrigeration, gas ovens and, later, an understanding of bacterial growth rates that made the risk of a slowly cooling box obvious.