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Vegetable Soup
2 cups brown soup stock 2 cups tomato juice 1 cup carrots 1 cup turnips Seasoning 1/2 cup celery 1 cup peas 1 onion 1 cup diced potatoes To the soup stock and tomato juice add the diced carrots, turnips, onion, celery, potatoes, peas and seasoning. Boil slowly for ten minutes and then place in the cooker for three hours. Use one radiator or cook a longer time. 3 potatoes 2 ounces butter
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a hard boil on the stove, then sealed into an insulated box to coast for hours on its own stored heat. Everything hinges on the food going into the box genuinely boiling.
- The hinge: start it boiling hotTen minutes of slow boiling is the entire heat budget. If the pot goes into the insulation lukewarm it will sit for three hours in the range where bacteria multiply, so bring it to a full rolling boil in a preheated, tightly covered pot and move it fast.
- What a "radiator" isA soapstone or cast-iron disc heated on the stove until very hot and set in the cooker under or over the kettle to extend the cooking time. Without one, the food simply cools from boiling over several hours, hence "cook a longer time."
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low for 3-4 hours, or a vacuum thermal cooker, does the same job with a known holding temperature. On a stove this is a 25-30 minute simmer, no more.
- Brown soup stockBeef stock made from bones and trimmings browned first, giving the color and depth. Two cups of a good beef stock, or a rich roasted-vegetable stock, stands in directly.
- SeasoningPeriod shorthand for salt and pepper. Start with about a teaspoon of salt for the four cups of liquid and correct at the end, since long insulated cooking mutes rather than concentrates.
- The peasPeriod fresh shelled peas were likely starchier than today's frozen ones. Modern frozen peas tend to go gray and mealy over three hours; add them in the last few minutes instead.
- Stray line at the end'3 potatoes 2 ounces butter' is a stray fragment, apparently belonging to another recipe rather than this soup. Ignore it.
- YieldRoughly six cups of finished soup, perhaps four servings as a first course; the recipe gives no yield.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1905 and the early 1920s. The principle is old and often traced to the Norwegian hay box, in which a boiling pot was buried in hay or wool and left to finish itself; the commercial version was a lined wooden or metal chest with fitted wells and one or more soapstone discs that were heated on the range and slipped in as "radiators." The appeal was fuel and attention: a coal or wood range could be let out after breakfast, and the cook was freed from the stove, and extension bulletins and domestic-science schools promoted the method during the First World War. A vegetable soup like this one suits the fireless method, since root vegetables reward long gentle heat and there is no roast or crust that needs a hot surface. Loose-leaf binders of this kind were sold so that pages could be added or replaced as equipment and habits changed.