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Vegetables in the Fireless Cooker
Prepare vegetables as usual. Place in vessel with small quantity of boiling water. As there is little evaporation in fireless cookers, allowance does not have to be made for loss by evaporation. Boil over free flame for 5 to 10 minutes. Transfer to cooker, using one radiator in bottom of well. Cook 3 or 4 hours, remove from cooker and season when ready to serve.
This is a method rather than a dish: instructions for finishing vegetables in a fireless cooker, the insulated box that held heat from a stove-top start. Almost nothing here translates directly, but the principle does.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated well, usually lined with felt, asbestos or packed hay, into which a hot covered pot was lowered and left. Apart from any preheated radiator set in the well, no further heat was added after the lid went on; the food coasted down from boiling over several hours.
- "One radiator"The radiators were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range until very hot, then set in the bottom of the well beneath the pot to extend the working temperature. This recipe calls for one; heavier or longer-cooking dishes were generally given more.
- The hinge: get it genuinely boiling firstThe 5 to 10 minutes over a free flame is not a formality. Beyond the stored heat of the radiator, the cooker supplies nothing, so the temperature the pot carries in is close to the highest it will reach, and a pot transferred at a simmer rather than a hard boil will cool correspondingly faster.
- Water quantity"Small quantity" means enough to cover the bottom and generate steam; the recipe gives no measure. The note about evaporation is the point of the whole method: a sealed insulated vessel returns nearly all its moisture, so vegetables finish more like braised than boiled.
- Modern equivalentAn electric slow cooker on low, or a vacuum thermal cooker, does this job with a controlled floor temperature. Timings are comparable, three to four hours for root vegetables, but a slow cooker holds heat rather than losing it, so green vegetables will overshoot badly.
- Temperature driftAn unheated insulated pot passes down through the range where bacteria multiply, and after three or four hours a vegetable pot may be well below 140F. That was acceptable when food went straight to the table; it is worth knowing before leaving a modern version standing.
- Season at the endThe instruction to season only when serving is sound: with almost no evaporation nothing concentrates, so salt, pepper and butter go in at the table.
Fireless cookers, also sold as hay boxes, thermos cookers or self-cooking cabinets, were a genuine domestic craze in the United States and Britain from roughly the 1900s into the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a chapter of directions for them. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, and a device that let the cook bring a pot to a boil in ten minutes and then walk away for the afternoon saved both money and attention. Home economists of the era promoted them heavily, and versions were built at home from a packing crate and a bale of hay as often as they were bought. They faded once gas and electric ranges with reliable low settings became common, but the idea survives in the vacuum thermal cooker still popular in East Asia and in the modern slow cooker.