THE POT ROAST STATE By Sarah Baird
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rowse any cooking gear website or flip on the television during a 2:30 a.m. infomercial block and you’ll immediately be shown a range of the newest, shiniest, latest-and-greatest kitchen tools that the modern dinner-maker must have. There’s a knife specifically designed for spreading butter and a special brush made to clean mushrooms. There’s an electric breakfast sandwich maker and a griddle exclusively for whipping up quesadillas. When it comes to kitchen gadgets, it seems, the parade of newfangled stuff is endless.
And then there’s the tried-and-true devices that have stuck with us for years: the cast iron skillets that have been passed down through generations, or the salad spinner that’s moved with you from apartment to apartment since you were 19. These are the kind of allies in the kitchen trenches we tend to turn to in a pinch and that have never let us down—something most of us can’t say about the likes of a mushroom-cleaning brush. With its squat, unassuming body, easygoing attitude and—if you’ve had one for a couple of decades—funky color, the Crock Pot (known more generically as a slow cooker) is chief among these old-guard cooking contraptions that are as reliable as the sunrise. Sometimes unfairly maligned as a device built only for suburban moms and potluck dinners, a closer look reveals that Crock Pots are the kind of egalitarian gadget that appeals to people at practically every level of cooking confidence and allows skeptical individuals to try out recipes in the kitchen with relative ease. The Crock Pot—originally named the Naxon Beanery—was patented in 1940 by Irving Nachumsohn, the same man who brought us the electric frying pan, the lava lamp and even a prototype version of the scrolling stock ticker (known as “the zipper”) that flashes bright in Times Square. His signature culinary invention, though, had somewhat slow-cooking sales until the early 1970s, when a major rebrand turned up the heat. ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT A bit of brown sugar balances out the acidity in tomato-based stews, and bolsters the flavor of savory dishes like pot roast.
MISSISSIPPI POT ROAST RECIPE ON PAGE 43
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“At Chicago’s 1971 National Housewares Show…the newly rebranded version of the Naxon Beanery [was unveiled]. Dubbed the Crock Pot, the appliance received a new name, refreshed appearance and a booklet of professionally tested recipes,” writes Michelle Delgado in a 2019 Smithsonian
Magazine article about Crock Pots. “Home cooks eagerly brought their Crock Pots home, in distinctly ‘70s hues like Harvest Gold and Avocado. Advertising campaigns, along with word of mouth, drove sales from $2 million in 1971 to an astounding $93 million four years later.” Today, you can purchase a Crock Pot with your favorite football team’s logo on it or one specifically branded with a shabbychic floral pattern by Food Network star Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman). You can buy them in a variety of sizes and with plenty of accessories like thermal travel bags, silicon roasting racks and “meat claws” for shredding proteins as the slowly baste away. A 1974 avocado green Crock Pot is even on display in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. “It’s a simple device,” Paul Johnson, curator for the Division of Work & Industry at the National Museum of American History, says in the same Smithsonian article. “It’s hard to go wrong. People who don't have a lot of culinary training can figure it out.” In recent years, Crock Pot sales have held steady in the tens of millions—$12.8 million in 2018 alone—and the easy-to-use, time-is-on-your-side tool is a mainstay for a large swath of Americans, thanks in no small part to its unique adaptability. Sure, you can make a loaded baked potato soup or warm up nacho cheese in your slow cooker, but you can also make vegetables fresh from your summer garden into ratatouille, or create pennies-on-the-dollar,
