Boiled Meats
Put meat into kettle, cover with boiling water, boil hard 10 or 15 minutes; remove quickly to cabinet for 3 or 4 hours; then return to the stove and boil hard 5 or 10 minutes more and return to cabinet for 3 or 4 hours longer. Chicken and tender meats will not require a second heating. There is no danger from over-cooking. It is advisable to start cooking meats for mid-day meal the night before; leave in cabinet over night, and give it a second boiling in the morning; for supper start in the morning. re-heat at noon. For boiling dinner, put the vegetables in the kettle with the meat at the second boiling. Always be sure that water is boiling hard when kettle is placed in the cabinet. Do not allow meat to cool slowly.
This is a fireless-cooker method: the pot is boiled hard on the stove, then shut into an insulated box (the "cabinet") to finish on retained heat. The technique cannot be made safe with a thermometer or a timer adjustment, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- What the "cabinet" wasA fireless cooker or cooking cabinet: a wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt, asbestos or mineral wool, sometimes with soapstone or iron discs heated in the fire. It has no heat source of its own. Everything in the recipe depends on the box being tight enough to hold near-boiling temperature, and a domestic box cannot be relied on to do that for three or four hours, let alone overnight.
- The temperature the meat actually passes throughBoiling liquid in an insulated chest falls steadily, and over a hold of several hours, and certainly over a whole night, it passes down through the range in which bacteria multiply fastest and finishes at room temperature. A large joint sitting in warm broth is close to an ideal culture medium.
- Boiling does not sterilise the potTen minutes of hard boiling kills vegetative bacteria but not the spores of Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus, both common on raw meat. Boiling in fact heat-shocks those spores into germinating, and they then grow rapidly in the cooling, oxygen-poor liquid. C. perfringens is one of the most frequent causes of foodborne illness traced to large cuts of meat and gravy held warm.
- The overnight instruction is the worst of itStarting the midday meal the night before and giving it "a second boiling in the morning" means eight to twelve hours of unrefrigerated holding. Reboiling kills the bacteria that have grown but not the heat-stable toxins some of them leave behind, so the second boil does not undo the first hold.
- "There is no danger from over-cooking"True as far as texture goes, but there is no way to know what temperature the interior of the joint held: the recipe offers no target and no thermometer.
- Chicken is the highest risk hereThe line "chicken and tender meats will not require a second heating" means a whole bird gets one 10 or 15 minute boil and then finishes on falling heat in its own broth for hours. There is no way to know that the bird reached a safe temperature at the bone before the liquid cooled, and the slow cool that follows is precisely the condition the recipe elsewhere warns against.
- If you want the resultThe dish the author is after is a long, gentle simmer that keeps meat moist without a hot stove all day. A modern slow cooker, a low oven or a covered pot on a low burner all reach that result while staying above 140F throughout. Use a current recipe for the cut you have.
Fireless cookers were a genuine craze in American and British households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, and a number of general cookbooks of the period carried a short section of instructions for them. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be fed and watched, and a well-packed box promised to finish a joint or a pot of beans on heat already paid for, while the kitchen stayed cool and the cook went out. Commercial cabinets were sold with heated soapstone discs, but the same principle was widely improvised at home as a "hay box" — a crate stuffed with hay and lined with newspaper. The method died out with the spread of reliable gas and electric ranges, and with it went the assumption, visible throughout this recipe, that food left standing warm all day was simply food that had been thriftily cooked. Bacteriology caught up with domestic cooking only gradually; the specific link between slow-cooled meat dishes and Clostridium perfringens was not worked out until the middle of the twentieth century, decades after instructions like these were printed in good faith.