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Cereals in the Fireless Cooker
Prepare cereal for cooking in double boiler as usual. Boil over fire for 5 minutes; place in larger vessel of boiling water in cooker, and allow it to remain 4 or 5 hours or longer. If placed in cooker at night it should remain warm enough to serve for breakfast.
This is a method rather than a recipe: no grain, no water, no salt, no yield. It assumes you already know your cereal's usual proportions and that you own a fireless cooker, an insulated box that holds heat rather than supplying it.
- The hinge: everything must go in boilingA fireless cooker adds no heat at all. The cereal, the double boiler and the surrounding water must all be at a full boil when they go into the insulated chamber, and the lid must be closed immediately. Any heat lost at this stage is heat you never get back over the next five hours.
- What "cereal" meant hereSteel-cut oats, cracked wheat, whole hominy, coarse cornmeal or pearled barley " the grains that genuinely wanted several hours. Rolled and flaked cereals of the modern kind cook in ten minutes and will collapse into paste. Reckon roughly 4 parts water to 1 part steel-cut oats or cracked wheat, plus about a teaspoon of salt per cup of grain.
- Fireless cooker, translatedA wooden or metal chest packed with hay, asbestos, felt or ground cork, holding one or two nested pails. The nearest modern equivalents are a vacuum thermal cooker or a slow cooker on low; a heavy pot wrapped in towels inside a cooler works but loses heat faster than the originals did.
- The water bath is the pointThe larger vessel of boiling water is a heat reservoir, not just a gentle cooking medium. Fill it as full as the cooker allows " more water means a slower temperature decline and a better result at hour five.
- The five-minute boilThat short boil over direct heat is there to gelatinize the starch and get the whole mass to temperature. Stir it during those five minutes so the grain does not settle and cook unevenly.
- About the overnight versionThe instruction to leave it from night until breakfast is the one part of this worth reconsidering. Cooked grain held for eight or ten hours at a slowly falling temperature is a textbook setting for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling and whose toxin survives reheating. For an overnight cereal, use a slow cooker that keeps the food genuinely hot, or cook it, chill it promptly, and reheat in the morning.
- Yield and textureA cup of steel-cut oats treated this way gives about four breakfast servings. Long, slow hydration produces a creamier, less distinct grain than a 30-minute stovetop cook; a brisk stir and a splash of milk or cream before serving loosens it.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the United States between roughly 1900 and 1920, promoted in cookbooks, women's magazines and home economics classes as a way to save fuel, keep the kitchen cool and free the cook from watching a pot. The principle " bring food to a boil, then bury it in insulation " is old and widespread, and is generally traced to hay-box cooking in northern Europe; Norwegian and German versions were both cited by American writers of the period. Commercial cookers were sold as furniture-like chests, and homemade ones were built from packing cases and hay. Cereals were a common demonstration dish because coarse whole grains, before the rolled and steam-flaked breakfast products took over, needed hours of gentle cooking that no one wanted to supervise before dawn.