1730 Tin: Cornell Reading Courses 



heat is locked up and utilized for cooking iiLStcad of beinj^' allowed 

 to escape. 



Primitive people have made use of leaves and earth to prevent the 

 escape of heat from food being cooked by means of hot stones or hot 

 ashes. Campers, who necessarily employ the more primitive ways of 

 cooking, can testify to the long time that heat can be retained by covering 

 hot ashes with earth. 



The bean hole of lumber camps continues the cooking of parboiled beans 



for twelve or fourteen hours by the heat stored up in the food, the bean 



pot, and the stones, and retained by a covering of earth. The following 



extract is taken from a government bulletin entitled Studies of the Food 



of Maine Lumbermen, by C. D. Woods and E. R. Mansfield: 



The beans are not baked in the cookroom, but in the bean hole, which 

 is simply a hole in the ground protected by a small log bmlding. The 

 beans are parboiled during the forenoon in an ordinary iron kettle on the 

 stove in the cookroom. The bean pot in which they are baked is of 

 iron with an overhanging iron cover, and it is filled with alternate layers 

 of salt pork and parboiled beans. A fire is then built in the bean hole 

 with both soft and hard wood to a depth of two feet, and when well under 

 way is covered with stones and old iron, when the covered pot of beans 

 is suspended over the fire. By the time the pot of beans has been heated 

 to the boiling point the fire is burned to coals, and the stones and pieces 

 of iron are red hot. The pot of beans is then placed directly upon these, 

 covered with hot ashes and earth, and left to cook overnight, usually 

 twelve to fourteen hours. In the morning the beans come from the hole 

 steaming hot and are served for breakfast. 



Feathers have been used as an insulator by the peasant folk of certain 

 countries; they have followed the practice of placing kettles of boiling 

 soup in feather beds, thus keeping the soup warm overnight. 



The idea of a special box for conserving heat for cooking purposes 

 seems to have originated in Norway, where hay was commonly used as 

 the insulator. However, a close approach to this apparatus, according 

 to one of the old Roman poets, was the Jewish beggar women's baskets 

 lined with hay to keep warm the bits of food given to them. The farmer 

 who lines with hay the box in which he carries home ice from town, makes 

 use of the principle on which the fireless cooker is constructed. Many 

 interesting applications of the principle could doubtless be brought to 

 light by a definite search for them. 



The Scientific American of October 28, 191 1, in an article entitled 

 Inventions Ahead of the Times, says: " Frequently inventions are made 

 before the time is ripe for them to go into general use. This is illustrated 

 in the so-called fireless cooker which has recently come into popularity 

 and is now used to a great extent." The article mentions an English 

 patent of 1857 and a United States patent of 1866, both of which embody 



