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String Beans (Break rather than cut)
Break rather than cut the beans into small pieces of about one half inch and, unless they are very fresh, it is well to soak them in ice water one hour before cooking. Then throw them into boiling water; season with salt and pepper and a little butter. the dish; place in the cooker and leave two hours or more. Cover
A fireless cooker recipe, meaning the beans finish by retained heat in an insulated box rather than over a flame. The typed instructions here have gotten scrambled — the words "Cover" and "the dish" belong together before "place in the cooker."
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or excelsior, into which a boiling-hot covered pot was sealed to coast to doneness. There is no heat source; everything depends on the food entering the box at a full boil in a heavy pot. A modern vacuum thermal cooker is the direct descendant; a slow cooker is not the same thing, since it adds heat continuously.
- The hinge: it must go in boilingBring the beans and their water to a hard rolling boil for several minutes before the pot leaves the stove, and move it into the cooker immediately with the lid on. A pot that enters merely hot will sit for two hours in the temperature range where food spoils rather than cooks.
- Break rather than cutMany bean varieties of the period still carried tough strings, and snapping by hand was held to pull the fibre away along the seam where a knife would sever it and leave it behind. Stringless sorts already existed, and with modern beans the point is largely moot.
- The ice-water soakAn hour in ice water rehydrates limp beans that have been sitting since market day. Beans bought crisp today do not need it.
- Water quantityNone is specified. Use only enough to just cover — a fireless cooker loses nothing to evaporation, so beans that swim will finish waterlogged and pale.
- Two hours is a long timeExpect thoroughly soft, olive-green beans in the style of the period, not bright crisp-tender ones. If you want them to keep some bite, an hour is closer to the mark; the method cannot be hurried past that because the pot is only cooling.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and butter go in at the start here, which is right for this method since there is no chance to adjust later without opening the box and losing the heat that is doing the cooking.
- YieldUnstated. A pound of beans in a covered two-quart pot serves four; scale to the pot your cooker takes.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1905 and the 1920s, promoted in extension bulletins and women's magazines as a way to save fuel and free the cook from a hot summer kitchen. The principle is old — hay-box cooking is generally traced to Scandinavian and central European rural practice — but it was marketed in this period as scientific economy. Beans were a natural candidate: cheap, forgiving of long cooking, and grown in nearly every kitchen garden. That the section survives in a loose-leaf book meant for a housewife to expand is a reminder of how briefly this equipment held its place, pushed out within a generation by reliable gas ranges and, later, the electric slow cooker that revived the same idea with a heating element added.