"Eternal" One POT Cooking for ever & ever.

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Sourdough

"Eleutheromaniac"
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Mar 17, 2018
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In a cabin, on a mountain, in "Wilderness" Alaska.
Note: Request this stay in prepping, as it has little to zero interest in modern "safe" cooking food preparation.

For starts I don't even know what this is correctly called, so I can't do a search. BUT, in the old frontier and I assume it came from Europe. They kept a continuous pot of food cooking simmering in the fireplace. This goes totally against modern food safety standards. I want to learn about this. What do you know about this....??
 
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When I lived Downeast Maine it was very common to do this. I had a pot on the wood stove that would sit and simmer. grab a bowl and a ladle ladle up a nice bowlful then I would add back beef, moose venison and let it keep simmering, make sure the liquid level was good

Good stuff.
 
I'd wager that this was actually pretty common up until after the second World War. Up to that point, most families lived more or less a subsistence life of eating what was in season, or whatever they could get their hands on that day. Families where also much larger then as well. A soup or stew is a great way to stretch your food stuffs. After WW2, the industrialization of our food became commonplace and people started being able to shop for whatever food they wanted, no matter the place or the season.

Prior to the second World War as well, refrigeration was limited to an ice box (with actual ice to cool it), so depending on the leftovers, it could have easily been safer to keep a pot on the stove with the stew in it at around 135 degrees (which is what the usda advises stews and soups to be held at for food safety).
 
i believe two of the first recipes..and who knows for sure...but here in the u.s. anyways were brunswick stew and gumbo.both are very similar or can be depending on whos cooking and location.theres lots of arguments about brunswick stew origin but its probably from north carolina or jefferson himself.

bottomline..a pot on cooking all the time.

https://honest-food.net/brunswick-stew-recipe/


History of Brunswick Stew​


The absolute first reference to Brunswick stew I could find is in a novel called The Hidden Path, written in 1855: “There are nothing but little nubbins with not more than a dozen grains to the ear, heaving a sigh at the consequent delay of the Brunswick stew she had hoped to have smoking upon her board that day.”


As you can see, no details, just that it’s a thing. The author assumed people knew what Brunswick stew was.


Officially, Brunswick stew was first made by Jimmy Matthews, the camp cook for a party of rich Virginians, in 1828. There’s a plaque in Brunswick County, Virginia, to this effect. While the rich people were off hunting something grander, so the story goes, Jimmy went out squirrel hunting for the camp, got a few, then made this stew.


sidenote..jefferson died in 1826 and its recipe is in his writing and the above shows 1828 time frame.

the above article mentions the three sisters stew which is a native dish and both dishes above could have been a variation of 3 sisters. as of late i have been eating 3 sisters stew since i been growing all the items needed.practicing feeding myself without outside inputs and simple storage techniques needing no refrigeration or canning etc. @Sourdough is this prepping for survival?

anyhow heres just one of many 3 sisters stews.you can read about them in many books .buffalobird woman talks about this dish in native gardening book from early 1900.

https://honest-food.net/three-sisters-stew-grouse-stew/
 
sidenote..i am seeing many native people going back to eating the traditional 3 sisters stew. especially after these lock-down happened and many native had trouble accessing food stuff.

many tribes are raising their own foods and/or pushing towards that and more of their own traditional foods gather from wild too. i am seeing more buffalo herds on reservations as well and some are harvesting buffalo on a limited bases for now.

things are changing for some people ! free and independent

after eating this food i can say its taste great and very satisfying food.to be honest i could eat it everyday.
 
As near as I can tell (for now) this is called "Hearth Cooking". I am guessing it was standard cooking forever in Europe, and likely most of the world.
 
In Alaska, when the hunting SUCKS", you eat Moose "Track" stew.

Say Joe, did you see anything....???

No, just some Moose Tracks.
 
Sourdough said:
In Alaska, when the hunting SUCKS", you eat Moose "Track" stew.

Say Joe, did you see anything....???

No, just some Moose Tracks.
Click to expand...

Moose tracks are in abundance this time of year!

Back to the OP, I recall when I was a tot before we had electricity, there always seemed to be something on one of the fires in the cook house. I don‘t think it was a perpetual pot, but I was about 4-5 when we got electricity which changed things up. A lot of the pictures above remind me of the old cook house. Once we got electricity, cooking moved to the house. And with electricity, refrigerators took the place of the well house.
 
Tootsie said:
So much like the home I grew up in, built Revolutionary era.
Click to expand...
This is a sad story, The house where I grew up in Pa. had a huge open hearth fireplace in the indoor kitchen, it was at least eight feet wide, maybe ten feet wide, and a bit over six feet high. We did not use it, there was an alcohol cook stove. About a year after we moved in that house, they built cupboards and counter where the open hearth was. This was in the 50's. I'll bet who ever currently owns that house would be excited to know that hidden hearth was there.
 
Sourdough said:
This is a sad story, The house where I grew up in Pa. had a huge open hearth fireplace in the indoor kitchen, it was at least eight feet wide, maybe ten feet wide, and a bit over six feet high. We did not use it, there was an alcohol cook stove. About a year after we moved in that house, they built cupboards and counter where the open hearth was. This was in the 50's. I'll bet who ever currently owns that house would be excited to know that hidden hearth was there.
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity, what part of PA?
 
lilmissy said:
Out of curiosity, what part of PA?
Click to expand...
That house was near EXTON, Pa. Was on "Church Farm School" which was a work farm for unmanageable boys. I was not one of them. My father was assistant dairy herdsman on that farm. We moved a lot all-over south-central Pa. & southeast Pa. My dad was basically uneducated, and never had a decent job, we were always one move away from the bill collectors.
 
This all reminds me of a nursery rhyme my mom used to say when we were little:
Pease porridge hot
Pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old
Seems a nonsense rhyme, but it probably goes back a long long way to when a pot was kept going on the fire for days on end. Spell check didn't like the word Pease, so I had to go look it up. It's of British origin, referring to legumes, or an alternate spelling of the plural for pea.
 
I this was a pretty common way of cooking centuries ago and the ongoing pot was probably very common. What ever was left from one meal or day in the pot, was added to the next day.

Those deep fireplaces were multi purpose: cooking, heating. After watching historical films, filmed in historical homes, those fireplaces were the way a house was heated and where the cooking was done. Modern fireplaces are shallow and are inefficient for heating, but the deeper fireplace was able to produce and maintain heat in a home.

I think I've mentioned this before, the childhood poem, "Peas Porridge"

Peas porridge hot,
Peas porridge cold,
Peas porridge in the pot,
Nine days old.
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old.

I have thought about the origins of this poem. Surely this described what you are talking about.
 
Sourdough said:
That house was near EXTON, Pa. Was on "Church Farm School" which was a work farm for unmanageable boys. I was not one of them. My father was assistant dairy herdsman on that farm. We moved a lot all-over south-central Pa. & southeast Pa. My dad was basically uneducated, and never had a decent job, we were always one move away from the bill collectors.
Click to expand...
sounds like my childhood
 
I don't do any hearth cooking but I could. My home, which is well over 200 years old (earliest documentation we can find is a purchase and sales agreement dated 1813), has a beehive oven as well as a hearth crane with a cast iron cauldron. The entire chimney was rebuilt in the mid eighties and at the time a woodstove flue opening was included. I have cooked on the woodstove with cast iron skillets and a Dutch oven.

hearth 2.jpg


Thanks Sourdough for starting this thread. I must admit since reading it, I have gone down the rabbit hole and spent way more time than I expected reading about hearth cooking. One of the most interesting resources I found was a website with over 1,000 historic cookbooks (Historic Cookbooks on line).
 
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