Book Review: Crockery Cookery

Title: Crockery Cookery

Author: Mable Hoffman

Date: 1975

Publisher: HP/Bantam

ISBN: none

Length: 288 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photos of food

Quote: “You can go to work or spend a day leisurely shopping while your slow-cooking pot gently mingles flavors...and retains many vitamins high temperatures destroy.”

It is possible that, if I’d read this book and realized that it was possible to cook things in a removable, washable dish inside an electric slow-cooker, I would have got some use out of the one I briefly owned. As things were, trying to clean a pot that wouldn’t fit into the sink and couldn’t be immersed in soapy, chlorinated, and fresh water in turn got old in a hurry; I don’t think I used the Crock-Pot twice. Yet many busy cooks swear by them.

Slow cooking was not a new fad in the 1970s. It’s actually traditional in many cultures, where the original recipes might have involved sealing an earthenware pot with raw clay and burying it in the ashes overnight, steaming food between dense mats of seaweed in a heavy pot, or starting Sunday’s stew boiling over the fire that roasted Friday’s meat and then leaving the stew in the pot on Saturday. Foods called daube, olla,or tagine were named after heavy pots designed for slow cooking. Slow cooking methods fell out of favor when Americans got all excited about cooking with gas or electricity; slow-cooking on a gas or electric stove is as difficult as it is wasteful. When people became nostalgic about the slow-cooked stews Grandma used to make, manufacturers developed special electric slow cooking pots that used lower amounts of electricity to maintain lower temperatures longer, and slow cooking recipes became popular again.

Here is an expert recipe tester’s guide to cooking everything, including bread, in each of the early electric slow cooking pots. The main difference among those models and between them and more recent models, as Hoffman notes, is size; bigger recipes may not fit into some of the smaller pots. Also, I’ve not seen a slow cooker with a “browning” device lately, so if you want to brown or boil something on high heat, these days you do need a conventional pot, and if you want a crisp crust on baked goods you need to finish them in a hot oven. Otherwise...well, the recipes will work.

Personally, I’m not keen on that “baked beans” flavor produced by combinations of salt, sugar, vinegar, and mustard. It doesn’t make me sick, as some popular potluck dinner dishes do, so at a potluck dinner I’ll eat it and may even like it, but I don’t buy it for myself or cook it at home. Reading through her recipes, I suspect that that was Hoffman’s very favorite flavor in all the world. Then again, sweet-sour-salty flavors are traditional in Eastern Europe, the home of one of the major slow-cooking traditions, so Hoffman probably found a lot of recipes that featured that combination. In any case, considering how many recipes this book contains, it surprised me how few of them I added to my own “must try this some time” file.

You, however, might be another baked beans lover, in which case this cookbook is just for you.

In the 1970s mainstream foodies weren’t snobs about food additives so much as about having taken the time to prepare food at home. Recipes from this period often integrated “convenience food” products into elaborate recipes. Hoffman doesn’t use monosodium glutamate as a seasoning (it was marketed as one in the 1970s) but does use some bottled sauces that, although she doesn’t specify brand names, probably weren’t the same ones you might use now.

Of mostly nostalgic interest—although some of these gadgets are still in active service—is Hoffman’s 84-page guide to the slow cookers of the early 1970s, with full-page black-and-white photos of each one. That leaves almost 200 pages of recipes for meats, vegetables, breads, and desserts. There’s no particular effort to cater to any special diet, but among this many recipes it’s easy to spot the ones that are naturally gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, low-sodium, sugar-free, or whatever else you might want. Not many of the recipes are vegan, but enough are that this book might inspire vegans to use their slow cookers.

Next question: How will you, personally, like these recipes? Try them and see. Some things taste much the same whether they’re simmered half an hour on a stove burner turned to “low,” or steamed eight hours in a crock-pot. With other things, the difference is easy to spot. Steamed breads have a texture of their own, not unpleasant but distinctive. Some vegetables taste fresher when blanched briefly in boiling water and served before they completely wilt, and some are fresher (and more digestible) when slow-cooked. Beef slow-cooks well. Some people positively insist on slow cooking for rice, and you may like slow cooking for other grains. As with the microwave, the slow cooker adds a whole new range of possible flavors to the same old foods your family always eat.

If you have a slow cooker, you should have a collection of recipes for it. Here is an extensive one.