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Steamed Potatoes (Wash the potatoes in fresh)
Wash the potatoes in fresh water; put them into the kettle and cover with water (hot water preferred), clamping the lid on the kettle. Heat one radiator twenty minutes; place kettle over the radiator while heating. Pour the water off the potatoes, allowing only a little to remain and put the kettle into the cooker over the radiator. Cook for an hour and a half. Potatoes may be pared or unpared.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, and almost every instruction in it refers to equipment no longer in most kitchens. The method is sound retained-heat cooking; the hardware needs translating.
- What a "radiator" is hereNot a room heater. Fireless cookers came with soapstone or cast-iron discs, called radiators, that were heated on the stove and then set under and sometimes over the kettle inside an insulated box. "Heat one radiator twenty minutes" refers to twenty minutes of heating the disc on the fire or burner, with the kettle standing on it as it heats, rather than to twenty minutes of cooking in the box.
- The cooker itselfA wood or metal chest packed with asbestos, felt, hay or ground cork, holding one to three nested kettles with clamp-down lids. The clamping matters: it is what traps the steam so the potatoes cook in almost no liquid.
- The hinge: pour off nearly all the waterThe potatoes are steamed, not boiled, once they go into the box. The recipe wants only "a little" water left; more than that risks waterlogged potatoes, since very little can escape from a clamped kettle in an insulated box.
- Modern equivalentA thermal cooker or vacuum food jar works the same way. In a slow cooker, scrubbed potatoes with a little water on low come out much as described, though a slow cooker keeps adding heat rather than merely holding it.
- The hour and a half is realRetained-heat cooking runs well below boiling and falls further as it goes, so long times are not a sign of overcooking. Medium potatoes will be tender; very large baking potatoes may want longer, and they will not brown or crisp at any point.
- Start hotThe parenthetical preference for hot water is the whole economy of the method. Cold water absorbs the stored heat that was meant for the potatoes, and the kettle may never reach a cooking temperature at all.
- Seasoning and yieldSeasoning -- No salt is given; salt the water or the finished potatoes to taste. The recipe specifies no quantity of potatoes and no yield.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households roughly from the 1900s through the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a separate section for it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be fired for hours to hold a simmer, while a fireless cooker needed only enough fire to heat a soapstone disc, after which the insulated box did the work unattended and without heating the kitchen in summer. Commercial cookers were sold by mail order, and the domestic-science press printed plans for building one from a packing crate and hay, which is why the instructions here assume readers already know what a radiator is and how many their box takes. The principle never went away; it survives in the thermal cookers still sold in East Asia and in the Wonderbag-style insulated bags distributed for fuel-scarce households.