Bettina’s Fireless Cooker

The fireless cooker, so often mentioned by Bettina in the 1917 edition of A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband, was initially something of a mystery to me. Our heroine extolls it as something she uses “every day of the year”, inspires the soon-to-be-betrothed Ruth to request one as a wedding gift, and encourages Uncle John to buy one at once for his ailing and overburdened wife “to keep her at home.”

Sounds like a quite the deus ex machina--but just what is a fireless cooker? And why were all references to it dropped in the 1932 edition of the book? Was this device too expensive for the average early-20^th century housewife? Was it too cumbersome to be practical? Or, like early versions of the pressure cooker, did it prove to be something the book’s editors soon realized had the potential to blow out the walls of their readers’ kitchens?

In fact, Bettina’s fireless cooker was a device that that relied on trapped thermal heat to process the food—a concept still known to today’s backpackers and hikers and generally utilized in what is now known as a “thermal cooker”.

Before the 20^th century such devices were referred to as “hay boxes”: a box or container lined with hay or other insulating materials into which a pot of heated food could be deposited. The trapped heat allowed the food to continue cooking for hours with minimal supervision—a godsend no doubt to women managing the large families of the period.

However, Bettina’s fireless cooker incorporated what must have seen the latest in cooking technology: stones that could be heated upon the stove and then deposited in the box above and below the pot of food.

Apparently this breakthrough was short-lived—today’s thermal cookers are more like the hayboxes of yesteryear and use only the heat generated by the pot of food itself (no surprise as the heating and depositing of large stone into the fireless cooker must have led to any number of injuries). They range from models the size of a thermos to those with a capacity of seven liters—and some are even larger.

The fictional Bettina and her real-life creators would probably be pleased to see that versions of the fireless cooker has lived on into our century, readily found on the Internet and moderately affordable for most.

Who could resist such a dream machine? After a little research I myself purchased one for myself (courtesy of Amazon)—an sturdy Japanese model that, upon arrival, provided an evening of unexpected jollies.

No, not from the cooker itself, which I found rather dazzling with its promise of almost-effortless food preparation. Rather, the hilarity came from the list of foods and their cooking times that was enclosed within the box.

Very amusing—and a good reminder that what’s considered an appropriate dish varies from country to country. Vive le Difference, one might think…but in fact, Bettina’s boiled cow tongue and "bacon pigs in blankets" would seem right at home with the pig’s intestines and fish head soup listed here!