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Veal and Rice
1/2 cup rice 2½ pounds veal 2 tablespoons butter 1 sliced onion 6 tablespoons water 1 tablespoon meat extract Boil the rice in salt water till soft (one can do this the day previous). Cut the veal in cubes. Heat the butter in a kettle; add the meat and sliced onion; leave until yellow. Then add the rice, which has been thinned with water and meat extract, and Parmesan cheese if desired. Put the closed kettle in the cooker for forty-five minutes. Use one radiator.
This belongs to the fireless-cooker chapter, a method that depends on equipment no modern kitchen has, and the instructions as given will not bring 2 1/2 pounds of veal to a safe temperature. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the problem.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal box lined with felt, asbestos or packed hay, holding a nest for the cooking kettle. It supplied no heat of its own; it only retained heat already in the food and in the "radiators."
- "Use one radiator"Radiators were solid soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range until very hot, then placed in the cooker under or over the kettle. The number called for varied with the length and weight of the cooking; this dish asks for the smallest number, one.
- Why this one failsTwo and a half pounds of veal cubes are only browned on the surface "until yellow," then combined with rice and a mere 6 tablespoons of thinned liquid and set aside in an unheated insulated box. There is no boiling stage before the kettle goes in, no thermometer, and no way to know the interior temperature. The meat may well never reach a safe temperature at all, and part of the mass may sit in the 40-140F range in which Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens and Staphylococcus aureus can grow.
- The rice compounds itThe rice may be boiled the day before, and the recipe says nothing about how it is to be kept in the meantime. Cooked rice held at room temperature is the classic vehicle for Bacillus cereus, whose emetic toxin is heat-stable; reheating in a fireless cooker that never reaches a boil would do nothing about it. Use a current braise or pilaf recipe with measured temperatures instead.
- Meat extractThe 1 tablespoon of "meat extract" is a thick, dark beef concentrate of the Bovril or Liebig type, sold in jars. It is a seasoning and colouring, not a stock; a tablespoon carries a great deal of salt.
- KettleIn this chapter a "kettle" is simply a lidded metal cooking pot sized to fit the cooker's well, not a tea kettle.
Fireless cookery was a serious enthusiasm in American households from roughly the 1900s through the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period gave it its own chapter. The appeal was fuel economy and freedom from tending a coal or wood range in a hot kitchen: heat a soapstone disc once, seal the food into an insulated box, and go about the day. Commercial cookers were sold by mail order, and magazines printed plans for building one from a packing crate and hay. The method genuinely works for grains and dried legumes, which need only prolonged moist heat, and it belongs to the same family as the modern thermal cooker and the haybox beloved of camp cooks. Its weakness was always meat, where the cook had no instrument to tell her what the temperature inside the box actually was, and its disappearance is often attributed to the spread of gas and electric ranges, and later refrigeration and thermometers.