When the Crock Pot Was New & the World Was Groovy, Plus a Tangy Beef & Vegetable Slow-Cooker Stew

The Crock Pot debuted at the National Housewares Show
in Chicago in 1971. It retailed for about $25 (comparable to a $100 + price tag today). Rival had actually obtained the original cooker, called the Beanery, from the Naxon Utilities Corporation, but repurposed the appliance to target a much broader, rapidly growing audience, women who worked away from home all day. The key selling point: Plug in a big pot of  ingredients before you leave in the morning and have a hot meal waiting to serve the family when you get home at night. 

Even though the appliance had a drawback–truly tasty dishes were in fact harder to turn out than people expected–the message resonated, and according to Rival’s figures, Crock Pot sales took off.  In  1971, the Crock Pot earned $2 million; then $10 million in 1972;  $23 million in 1973; $57 million  in 1974, and a peak $93 million in 1975. The craze was over and sales started dropping, but the slow cooker habit stuck and the pots became a permanent fixture in many households.

The pesky little problem of  disappointing dishes–slow cooker fare tended to be watery and bland if cooks tried to prepare their favorite “regular” stove-top stews and soups in the appliance–sent the first wave of consumers scrambling for  recipes that would yield better results. Enter industrious home economist Mable Hoffman, whom a smallish publisher called HP Books hired on a tight deadline to cook up a cookbook to meet this demand. Trained in recipe development and food science at the University of Maryland and already
experienced at creating recipes for corporate clients, Mable, shown below left with several 1970s Crock Pots (note their Brady Bunch orange and avocado green colors), was perfect for the task.

During a talk she gave at a culinary conference in the late
1980s, she said that to deliver the manuscript on time she’d set up twenty Crock Pots in her California kitchen and tested more or less nonstop for months. One major challenge of creating slow cooker recipes, she observed, was that, “it took a whole day to do a dish from start to finish!”

By the time I met Mable at the culinary conference she was already a legend in the cookbook business. After Crockery Cookery, she’d  gone on to write a whole series of HP cookbooks, Deep Fry Cookery in 1977, Chocolate Cookery in 1978, Crepe Cookery in 1979, and, Healthy Crockery Cookery in 1985, in the process helping to turn her publisher into a major force in the industry. (Eventually, over 25 years, Mable wrote eighteen cookbooks and won several awards for excellence.) Like many other awe-struck young food writers then, I aspired to emulate Mable and write a bestseller for HP Books. No, HP never took me on, though another company did publish my first cookbook (which was not a bestseller) in 1985.


Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mable’s incredible success was that she handled it with such grace. She was always approachable, friendly, and down to earth, and readily acknowledged that as the New York Times had suggested, the staggering sales numbers of  Crockery Cookery were partly due to being in the right place at the right time “with the right thing.” During her talk she also allowed that she didn’t consider it her best book, and even agreed with detractors that slow cookers tended to make dishes taste flat.

Still, it was clear that Mable was a talented, dedicated pro who had carefully analyzed how to create appealing recipes and methodically tested them to deliver the best possible results. And, we noted, she was willing to share her expertise.

She said that one key to slow cooker recipe success was to incorporate far less liquid than was called for in traditional stove-top stews and soups and to use extra-flavorful broths and seasonings. She had figured out that the evaporation of moisture and associated concentration of flavor that normally occurs during simmering and boiling just didn’t happen in the Crock Pot, and she always took this into account. Another tip she said she’d discovered later while working on her Healthy Crockery Cookbook  was to reserve some herbs or other seasoning ingredients and add them in at the very end of cooking. She felt this produced brighter, fresher tasting dishes, and I’ve found through my own recipe developing that she was absolutely right.

Nearly forty years later millions of American families are still cranking out “set it and forget it” meals in a slow-cooker, most often in a Rival Crock Pot. The model shown in the background at the top is modern, but I still have and occasionally use the vintage orange and blue striped one I bought decades ago. Frankly, I think I’m showing more wear than the pot!

Though I’ve created a number of slow-cooker recipes over the years, this one is a brand new. I wanted to head in a healthful direction with it–keeping the fat and sodium moderate and boosting the consumption of veggies, nutrients and fiber. To give the stew a bit of extra zip, I use Mable’s trick of adding in a flavor enhancer (some barbeque sauce) near the end, and garnishing the stew generously with fresh chopped parsley.  (Of course, the parsley can be omitted if you wish.)

For another, totally different beef dish (with red wine) inspired by a Julia Child recipe from the same era, go here.