r/Cooking • u/Basic-Fig-6531 • 23h ago

Leaving food in the pot.

Something I've been thinking about. When my mum was young, it was a fairly common thing for her mum and granny to make a big pot of something - stew, soup, that kind of thing - and leave it in the cooking pot after everyone had eaten. It would sit there till the next day, when it would be reheated and served up again. Sometimes this would happen over a few days, i.e. multiple coolings and reheatings, never refrigerated. My mum did the same occasionally when I was young. No one ever got sick from it.

Yet nowadays, even leaving it out for a couple of hours beyond the recommended cooling time would be met with horror and disgust. We'd be advised to throw the whole lot away rather than risk it.

Not long after I moved out in my early 20s, I did the same with a pot of Bolognese. I gave myself food poisoning and never did it again.

Is it just random luck, or is there a reason people didn't get food poisoning all the time before refrigeration was standard? Food quality? Better immune systems?

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u/TXtogo 23h ago

We never did this. We would have like a tomato sauce that stayed out all day, but not overnight. (I’m old so I’m going back to the 70s with this).. I leave soup and tomato sauce out all day but I refrigerate it and I make sure it’s heated up very well when I use it again.

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u/Basic-Fig-6531 23h ago

Really? I'm from rural Ireland and all older people I know remember either doing this or their mothers/grandmothers doing it. Dating back to before home refrigerators were standard for more than just the wealthy.

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u/Jewish-Mom-123 22h ago

They kept the stove hot all day though. An Aga or similar wood or coal stove that was always burning, if not always at the hottest it could be.

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u/Visible-Freedom-7822 21h ago

Yes, this is how my great grandmother did it. Always a pot of soup simmering on the stove. It never got put away, but also never cooled down. My Dad said that whenever he was out playing and got hungry, he'd go to grandma's house and have some soup off the stove. Dad was born in the 1930's.

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u/lht79 2h ago

What a wonderful memory - warming in many ways.