Roast Meats
Prepare and season meat in usual way. Place in large dry vessel; put very hot radiator in bottom of cooker well; place vessel containing roast on radiator, and place another very hot radiator on top. (It may be suspended to cover inside of vessel if there is room.) Close cooker and fasten. Allow it to remain about one-half hour per pound of meat.
The roast may be browned in a very hot oven before putting into cooker or just before serving.
This is not an oven recipe at all — it is a set of instructions for a fireless cooker, a lidded, heavily insulated box that cooked food with stored heat from preheated metal or soapstone discs. Almost nothing in it maps directly onto a modern kitchen, so it is worth knowing what each piece of equipment was before deciding what to do with it.
- What a "radiator" isNot a heating appliance but a solid disc of cast iron or soapstone, sold with the cooker, heated on the range or in the oven until it was near red-hot. Two of them, above and below, surrounded the meat with radiant heat that slowly bled away over several hours. There is no modern household equivalent.
- The "cooker well"The insulated cavity of the fireless cooker, lined with felt, asbestos, mineral wool or packed hay. The whole point is that no heat is added after the lid is fastened; the temperature only falls from the moment you close it.
- "Large dry vessel"Dry means no added liquid — this is a roast, not a pot roast. The vessel was typically a fitted pail of aluminum or enamel ware that sat closely in the well.
- Half an hour per poundFor a 5 lb roast that is two and a half hours in a container whose temperature is dropping the entire time, so the timing is guesswork layered on guesswork. An instant-read thermometer in the center of the meat is the only test that means anything: 145F for whole cuts of beef, lamb and pork, with a three-minute rest, and 165F for poultry.
- The browning stepThis is the sound part of the method and worth keeping in any form. The cooker produced no crust, so the recipe calls for browning in a very hot oven — by the period's reckoning roughly 450-500F — either before the meat goes in or shortly before serving.
- If you want to reproduce the resultThe dish the cooker produced is a slow, dry, gently roasted joint. A conventional oven held at 250-275F to a measured internal temperature does the same job with heat you can actually control, followed by the high-heat browning the original already calls for.
- YieldUnstated, as with most equipment instructions of this kind. Reckon on the usual 1/3 to 1/2 lb of boneless meat per person, rather more with bone in.
Fireless cookers were a genuine enthusiasm of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a page or two of instructions for them. The principle is much older — a pot of boiling food buried in insulation and left to finish on its own heat — but over roughly the first decade and a half of the century it was commercialized in the United States as a manufactured cabinet with fitted pails and soapstone or iron discs. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, and a device that let a housewife heat two discs, shut the lid and leave the kitchen for the afternoon promised savings in both fuel and attention. Government and household-economy campaigns during the First World War pushed them harder still. They faded quickly once reliable gas and electric ovens with thermostats became common, which is also why instructions like these read as a set of directions for a machine rather than as a recipe for a dish.