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Roast Pork (Select a piece suitable)
Select a piece suitable in shape for fitting in the larger vessel and cook from one hour and a half to three hours, according to the size of the roast.
This is not a standalone recipe so much as a line in a chapter on fireless cookery, and it depends entirely on equipment and preliminary steps the page does not describe. As written it gives no way to know whether the pork ever reaches a safe temperature.
- What the "larger vessel" wasWhat the "larger vessel" may have been -- The phrasing suggests a fireless cooker: an insulated box holding metal food pails, with soapstone or iron discs ("radiators") heated on the range and placed above and below the food. Such a box supplies no heat of its own; from the moment it is closed, everything inside is cooling. The page itself does not describe the apparatus, so this is inference.
- Why that is the problem hereA pork roast large enough to need three hours is a dense mass. In a falling-temperature box its centre may sit for a long stretch within the roughly 40F to 140F range in which Salmonella, Listeria and Clostridium perfringens can multiply. Slow cooking is not itself unsafe; slow cooking with no measured, maintained temperature is.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe instruction offers a time range of an hour and a half to three hours and nothing else: no radiator count, no preheating of the meat, no searing, no finish in the oven. There is no figure in the recipe that could be checked against a thermometer.
- Trichinella and the period's assumptionsEarly twentieth-century American cooks were warned repeatedly to cook pork thoroughly because of trichinosis. Commercial pork today carries a very low trichinella risk, but that change does not rescue this method, which cannot demonstrate that any target temperature was met.
- Time as a proxy for doneness"According to the size of the roast" is the sort of time-based guidance common in cookbooks of the period. It is the weakest part of the instruction and the reason the page cannot be followed as given.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for pork shoulder or loin with a stated oven temperature and an internal temperature to cook to. Read this entry as a document of how the fireless cooker was sold and used.
Fireless cookers were a genuine craze in American households from roughly 1900 through the First World War, and chapters on them turn up in a number of general cookbooks of the period. The principle was retained heat: stone or metal discs were heated on the coal or gas range, packed into an insulated chest around the food pails, and the box shut for the working day. The appeal was fuel economy and freedom from tending a fire in a hot kitchen. What the entry does not carry is any notion of a verified internal temperature; the meat thermometer did not become common household equipment until decades later, which is precisely why terse entries of this kind now read as unusable.