Читать книгу The Fireless Cook Book - Margaret Johnes Mitchell - Страница 4

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Does the idea appeal to you of putting your dinner on to cook and then going visiting, or to the theatre, or sitting down to read, write, or sew, with no further thought for your food until it is time to serve it? It sounds like a fairy-tale to say that you can bring food to the boiling point, put it into a box of hay, and leave it for a few hours, returning to find it cooked, and often better cooked than in any other way! Yet it is true. Norwegian housewives have known this for many years; and some other European nations have used the hay-box to a considerable extent, although it is only recently that its wonders have become rather widely known and talked about in America. The original box filled with hay has gone through a process of evolution, and become the fireless cooker of varied form and adaptability.

Just what can we expect the fireless cooker to do? What foods will it cook to advantage?

Almost all such dishes as are usually prepared by boiling or steaming, as well as many that are baked—soups, boiled or braised meats, fish, sauces, fruits, vegetables, puddings, eggs, in fact, almost everything that does not need to be crisp can be cooked in a simple hay-box. If the composition of foods and the general principles of cookery are well understood, but little special instruction will be needed to enable one to prepare such dishes with success; though even a novice may use a fireless cooker if the general directions and explanations, as well as the individual recipes, are carefully read and followed. While such dishes as toast, pancakes, roast or broiled meats, baked bread and biscuits, are impossible to cook in the simpler form of hay-box, the insulated oven, the latest development of the fireless cooker, opens up possibilities that may lead to a much wider adaptation of home-made insulators to domestic purposes. Roast meats, however, may first be cooked in the oven and completed in the hay-box or cooker, or they may be cooked in the hay-box till nearly done and then roasted for a short time to obtain the crispness which can be given only by cooking with great heat.

During ordinary cooking there is a great loss of heat, due to radiation from the cooking utensil and escaping steam. If, however, this heat could be retained, the food would continue to cook in the absence of fire. This is what occurs in the hay-box. Hay, being a poor conductor of heat, will, if closely packed around a kettle of boiling food, maintain, for a number of hours, a sufficiently high temperature to continue the cooking process. The familiar practice of using newspapers or carpet in keeping ice from melting depends upon the same principle. In both cases a material which is a poor conductor of heat, when interposed between the surrounding air and articles which are either colder or hotter than the air, being found to preserve their temperature. Other materials than hay or papers will act in the same way; such, for instance, as excelsior, sawdust, wool, mineral wool, and others. A vacuum will have the same effect as insulating materials. The “Thermos Bottle” and similar inventions, which are glass bottles surrounded by a vacuum and contained in metal cases, will keep foods hot or cold for many hours. If heated with a little boiling water before boiling food is poured in they will even cook some foods satisfactorily. A vacuum is expensive, as it is difficult to obtain, and therefore the ordinary fireless cooker is better suited to every-day use; but if one of these bottles is at hand it may be utilized in cases of illness or on journeys or in other unusual circumstances, when a cooker is not available.

The general trend of recent scientific investigation seems to indicate more and more clearly that the prevalent idea that all food must be cooked at a high temperature, such as that of boiling water (212 degrees Fahrenheit), is a mistaken one. Experiments have shown that starches are made thoroughly digestible at temperatures varying from 149 degrees to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Cellulose, the woody fibre of vegetable foods, becomes perfectly softened at a temperature considerably below 212 degrees, while albuminous materials, of which all animal and many vegetable foods are largely composed, are not only well-cooked at a low temperature, but are decidedly more easily digestible than when cooked at the higher temperatures of boiling or baking.