Observing the unwatched pot

The cover of The Unwatched Pot: A Crockful of Recipes for Electric Slow Cooking (Paula Franklin for Hamilton Beach, 1975) looks like the coziest version of the 1970s.

I love the brick-wall-print slow cooker, the subtle harvest gold theme, and the funky cutting board. The cover doesn't make a bit of sense if you examine it for more than a second, though. How is a bunch of asparagus taller than the slow cooker and nearly as wide? And why do we need a collection of asparagus, mushrooms, cauliflower, a pepper, and a beet when the slow cooker is clearly already full and probably done cooking (based on the steam and the brown meat)? This is not even mentioning that the contents of the slow cooker (likely meat, peas, carrots, and potatoes) have absolutely no overlap with anything being prepped. So it's a cozy cover, but it's best not to think too hard about it.

The recipes are mostly what you'd expect in a slow-cooker cookbook-- a lot of stews and braises. This book does try to adapt other types of recipes for the slow-cooker, too, though, and I have to wonder about how well that might have worked. For instance, I imagine that the high point for many green bean casserole aficionados is the crispy canned onion topper. For that reason, I assumed that the slow-cooker version would encourage diners to pass the crispy onions around to top servings once the dish was done.

And I was very wrong. Not only are the fried onions slow-cooked for the entire time, but they are also cooked under wet ingredients: water chestnuts and a cream-of-chicken-soup-and-wine sauce! There can't be much crunch left by the time this is ready....

I doubt I'm alone in thinking that one of the slow cooker's charms is the chance to come home to an amazing-smelling house, knowing that deliciousness will be ready and waiting. And that is part of the reason I'm so skeptical of the fish recipes. Salmon loaf is probably low on anyone's list of favorite meals anyway, and if you've had it cooking for 4-5 hours, the whole house will smell like it for a week afterward.

Plus, I'm not entirely sure how well this would even work. This is a small recipe-- less than a pound of canned salmon once the skin and bones are removed. Mix it with a few jarred mushrooms, bread crumbs, eggs, and cheese. It doesn't seem like that would be enough to fill a slow cooker, so I kind of expected the instructions to say to put it into a smaller pan, put the pan in the slow cooker, and add water to steam this. Nope-- just smear the bottom of the slow cooker with fish bits! Maybe cooks are expected to use a smaller cooker-- not the family's regular full-size one-- but even if the family has multiple sizes of slow cookers (which seems unlikely), there is no real indication to break out the smaller one. I just don't know what is going on here.

Tunafish Casserole is also likely to make you wash the kitchen curtains afterwards because you can't stand that smell anymore.

At least it seems likely to fill the cooker a little better, what with the cream of mushroom soup, three eggs, half-cup of green olives, and cup of dry white wine along with the bread and cheese, but I can't get past the feeling that this would come out unpleasantly gluey.

The book also suggests cooking dessert in the slow cooker. There are plenty of recipes for poached fruit, but I'm more interested in the recipe for banana bread. 

Let's make that flowerpot banana bread! It combines the brief 1970s interest in cooking desserts in flowerpots (Use a NEW one! Not the one that had begonias in it!) with the idea that a crock pot is a good place to bake something (even though the food is not going to brown). People must have been really bored back then. (I mean, this was before they could make up weird shit and post it to social media for the clicks.)

In any case, I'm glad I got to observe The Unwatched Pot. I just hope it doesn't feel violated given that I spent a few hours looking at it.