History of Slow Cooking and the Crock Pot

When I was a girl, my mother used to slow cook many of our weekend meals. She'd assemble the ingredients in the morning, place them in a huge kettle, and let the meat and vegetables simmer all day long. This was her way of using up aging vegetables and making those budget cuts of meat edible.

The history of slow cooking

Ever since man first tamed fire, slow cooking was discovered as a way to soften up and tenderize those tough slabs of meat and fibrous rooty vegetables. In prehistoric times, indigenous peoples often cooked wild root plants in a slow burning fire pit for a full 24 hours. This released the nutrition locked into the bulbs and made them much more tender and tastier to eat. Tough meat cuts especially benefit from slow cooking. Slow cooking these chewy cuts broke down the collagen in the meat and turned it into a gelatinous broth. As the fibers of the meat separated and shrunk during slow cooking, the juices would moisten the meat and turn even the toughest cuts into a mouth watering meal.

As food preparation became more refined, family chefs looked for quicker ways to prepare their meals. Modern appliances and easy fixing meals meant that all day cooking was a thing of the past. Slow cooking was considered an archaic pastime and primarily used to for stewing old hens, preparing kettles of soup and baking beans.

With canned bean selections pretty limited in the early 1960s, it's no wonder that the West Bend developed an electric bean cooker called the Bean Pot. This early electric slow cooker resembled a tradition crockery bean pot which rested on a warming tray.

The Crock Pot is developed

The Naxon Utilities Corp of Chicago developed their own version of a bean cooker, called the Beanery. This primitive slow cooker was a self contained unit and the precursor of the modern slow cooker. In 1970, the Rival company acquired the assets of the Naxon Utilities Corp and the rights to the Beanery. Rival refined the looks of the Beanery, and in 1971, introduced the Rival Crock-pot slow cooker.