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Roast Lamb
Select a small leg of lamb and cut off the shank, seasoning well in the usual way. Place in the larger vessel and use both radiators. Allow about twenty minutes or more for each pound of meat. Prepare sauce in the usual style.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, so almost all of it is written in a vocabulary that vanished with the appliance. The instructions assume you know the machine; here is what they actually mean, and how the dish translates to an oven.
- What the vessels and radiators areA fireless cooker was an insulated box holding nested metal pails. The "radiators" were solid soapstone or cast-iron discs heated red-hot on the range, then set above and below the food to supply all the cooking heat. "Use both radiators" means the leg gets top and bottom heat — the closest the appliance came to roasting rather than stewing.
- The hinge: the radiators must be fully heatedEverything depends on the discs going in genuinely hot, and the lid being clamped at once and not lifted. Open the box to check on the meat and you have thrown away the heat you cannot replace; the original gives no doneness cue at all, only a time per pound.
- If you have no fireless cookerTreat it as a slow oven roast: 325F, uncovered, on a rack. Twenty minutes a pound is close to right for that temperature on a small bone-in leg, but cook to internal temperature rather than to the clock.
- Internal temperature135F at the thickest part, away from the bone, for medium-rare after resting; 145F for medium. Rest the leg 15 minutes before carving. If you do use a fireless cooker, take the temperature the moment you open it — residual-heat cooking has no way to guarantee the meat cleared the danger zone promptly.
- "Cut off the shank"Presumably so the leg fits the pail, and still worth doing for oven roasting a small leg. Save the shank for braising; it will not roast in the same time as the fat end.
- "Seasoning well in the usual way"For this period that means salt and pepper, and often a little flour rubbed over the fat. Salt at least an hour ahead, or the night before.
- "Sauce in the usual style"Gravy from the pan drippings, thickened with flour and let down with stock or water. A fireless cooker yields pale, unbrowned drippings, so if you want depth, sear the leg in a hot pan or under the broiler first.
- YieldA small leg — say 4 to 5 lb bone-in — will serve six.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in North American kitchens from roughly 1905 through the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period, Mrs. Fryer's among them, sometimes carried a separate section for it. The appeal was fuel and attention: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, while a leg of lamb shut into an insulated box with two heated soapstones would look after itself while the cook did the wash. The section's clipped style — "season in the usual way," "prepare sauce in the usual style" — suggests, though it does not prove, that these pages were written as a supplement for someone who already owned the standard recipes elsewhere in the book and needed only the conversion. Insulated cooking never disappeared; it returned as the vacuum flask, the haybox revival, and eventually the slow cooker, though those work by holding a low temperature rather than by spending a single charge of stored heat.