Lela Nargi - The Farmers Wife Slow Cooker Cookbook: 101 Blue-Ribbon Recipes Adapted from Farm Favorites!

101 BLUE-RIBBON RECIPES
ADAPTED FROM FARM FAVORITES!

LELA NARGI, EDITOR

The Farmers Wife was a monthly magazine published in Minnesota between the years 1893 and 1939. In an era long before the Internet and high-speed travel connected us all, the magazine aimed to offer community among hard-working rural women by providing a forum for their questions and concerns, and assistance with the day-to-day goings-on about the farmeverything from raising chickens and slaughtering hogs, to managing scant funds and dressing the children, to keeping house and running the kitchen.

The farmers wife did not have a slow cooker, but she would have assuredly wanted one! The magazine was filled with articles extolling the virtues of time-saving devices of every stripe, especially those that would cut down on time spent in the kitchen, where the farmers wife labored for so much of each and every day. She may have loved to cook for her family, but she also loved to spend time with them outside the kitchen, and she was always looking for ways to create more free family time.

The farmers wife also did a great deal of cooking for large numbers of people: during the holidays; for family get-togethers; for community festivities; and perhaps that most important of all events, late summer threshing days, when friends, family, and neighbors came together to help each other separate grain from straw after the wheat harvest, using a communal threshing machine. Hearty meals, cooked in generous quantities and celebrating the spirit of community, were the true bailiwick of the farmers wife.

Contemporary cooks using a slow cooker for the first time or coming back to it after its metamorphosis from the days of the Crock-Pot will find plenty to recommend its method of cooking. The slow cooker is perfect for preparing stress-free family meals if a small amount of time for their preparation can be set aside first thing in the morning to get the ingredients ready for the pot. It is the champion of dinner parties; a vat of chili, enough to feed a small army, can be left unattended while host and hostess see to other preparations. It is a near-necessity at holiday time when the oven and stove burners are crammed with desserts and all manner of dishes aboil. It is even a welcome addition to the household for summertime meal making, when heat from the stove or oven is so unwelcome due to the outside swelter. Since the slow cooker hardly raises the temperature of the room, a cook can whip up hearty, delicious fare without collapsing from heat stroke.

Not every recipe devised by The Farmers Wife is appropriate or convenient for transferal to the domain of the slow cooker. In fact, a number of recipes tested for this book were utter fiascoes and were discarded. But casseroles, soups, and pudding-based desserts all appear in abundance on the pages of the magazine and are excellent slow-cooker fare. Ive tried to stay true to the original ingredients as much as possible while transitioning these recipes. This is easy-going country food for the most part, except for a few instances in which The Farmers Wife splashed out with exotic ingredients and dishes from foreign lands. Almost all the recipes can be doubled or tripled with ease, either to accommodate large gatherings or to store as leftovers for later mealsexactly the sort of penny-saving foresight The Farmers Wife practiced and appreciated.

As usual with the books in this series, make sure you understand the instructions and the order in which they are to be carried out before you start, and make sure you have all the necessary ingredients at hand and assembled. Then get ready to cook up some more farmland history, even more effortlessly than ever before!

Lela Nargi

The history of the slow cooker is a brief and simple one. Simple, because the origin of todays spiffy slow cooker is the beanpot. And theres not much thats simpler than the lowly bean or the method for cooking itsoak, simmer, and eat.

Beanpots were traditionally squat ceramic vessels that were glazed inside and out. They were designed to do nothing more than hold the beans while they were very slowly cooked for a period of many hours over a fireoften enough over an open fire, out on the range, or suspended in the fireplace. These were the days before canned, precooked beans were readily available on supermarket shelves, and housewives and ranch hands were required to prepare their own. The theory behind slow cooking the beans (as opposed to pressure-cooking them, the exact opposite method in which beans can be made ready to eat in a matter of minutes) is that long, slow simmering in a seasoned liquid will allow their innate bland flavor to take on the flavors of molasses, herbs, onions, garlic, and bacon. Boston Baked Beans are the quintessential example of what the beanpot was capable of producing.

Eventually, some innovator hit upon the idea of designing an electric beanpot. Like its nonelectric counterpart, it was meant to slow-cook the beans, but without the use of fuel, and without the cook having to attend to it. One design, the Beanery, was developed by an ill-fated company called Naxon Utilities. When the company was purchased by The Rival Company in 1970, the Beanery was absorbed into the new corporate structure and might have been forgotten. However, the president of Rival asked his on-staff home economist to experiment with the humble pot, to see what it would yield in addition to beans. What resulted was an entire book of gourmet slow-cooked recipes, and the remodeling of the Beanery into the Crock-Pot. Its motto: Cooks all day while the cooks away.

For years, throughout most of the 1970s, the Crock-Pot was hailed as the savior of the modern woman who no longer cared to be chained to her stove and a life of kitchen-bound drudgery, or to be referred to or thought of as a housewife, for that matter. The Crock-Pot would allow her to attend to the joys and demands of her career outside the home, yet still prepare delicious meals for her family, quickly, effortlessly, painlessly. A batch of ingredients went into the Crock-Pot in the morning before work and school. By the time everyone had arrived home at the end of the day, dinner was fully prepared. The only thing left to do was to serve the meal and maybe dish out some ice cream for dessert.