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White Turnips
Wash and pare the turnips; cut into slices and cover with boiling water. Cook for ten minutes and place in cooker for four hours. Drain and mash; season with salt, pepper and butter and serve hot. Use two radiators.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a boil on the range, then sealed in an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Almost everything in the instructions is about that box rather than about turnips.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest with close-fitting wells, packed with felt, asbestos or hay. Food went in boiling hot and coasted down over several hours. A heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler approximates it; a modern slow cooker is the nearest working equivalent, on low.
- "Use two radiators"Radiators were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range and set above and below the pot in the well. Two would have meant more stored heat, one top and one bottom. Modern kitchens have no direct equivalent, though a thoroughly preheated baking stone is the nearest thing; without them an improvised insulated box is unlikely to hold temperature for four hours.
- The ten minutes is the hingeThe food must go into the cooker at a full boil, with the pot filled and lidded tight. If the turnips are merely hot when they go in, the whole four hours happens in the temperature range where bacteria multiply. Do not shortcut the preliminary boil, and do not open the cooker to check.
- Four hours is not a cooking timeSliced turnip is tender in fifteen to twenty minutes of boiling. The four hours is simply how long the residual heat takes to do the same work. Cooked conventionally, drain when a knife slides through with no resistance.
- Which turnip"White turnip" here most likely means the small purple-topped summer turnip rather than rutabaga, which period books generally list separately as Swede or yellow turnip. Young ones need only a thin paring; older roots may have a woody core worth cutting out.
- Draining and mashingTurnips hold a great deal of water. Drain hard, then return the pan to low heat for a minute or two to steam off the surface moisture before mashing, or the purée will be soupy. Season generously; salt, pepper and butter is the whole of it, so the butter has to be real and the pepper freshly ground.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 2 lb of turnips, roughly four medium roots, for four side-dish servings.
Fireless cookery was a genuine craze in American households between about 1905 and the early 1920s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a chapter on it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range was expensive and miserably hot to keep going all afternoon, so bringing a pot to the boil and then letting insulation finish the job saved both money and kitchen temperature. Commercial cookers were sold by mail order, and wartime thrift campaigns promoted them, though home-built versions packed with hay were common enough that the technique is sometimes called hay-box cooking. Turnips were a natural candidate — cheap, stored well through winter, and forgiving of long slow heat. The method faded once gas and electric ranges made a low simmer cost almost nothing, and the modern slow cooker does much the same job with a small heating element in place of stored heat.