Cooking lunch

old ugly

Well-known member
I have warmed food up on the exhaust manifold before, but has any one cooked a meal in an exhaust manifold food cooker like the ones snyders sells?
 
OT, but I rigged a bread pan on top of my manifold, touching the whole length. It was just a line of direct contact, but it barely warmed up the chili or whatever I had after a 30 mile drive. Maybe I should have taken the fan off and got a short belt. My Dad talked about wiring cans of food to armored car manifolds in WW2, but they might have been happy for any warmth then.
 
It is a little hard to figure how much driving to cook a meal. It depends on the meal. Warming up sausages seems to work best. Get some aluminum trays from the market to line the insides of the cooker so that you do not have to clean the cooker.
 
I have warmed food up on the exhaust manifold before, but has any one cooked a meal in an exhaust manifold food cooker like the ones snyders sells?

A good friend of mine Paul Larson basically came up with the version you see around today. Full disclosure, I have not done it that much on a Model-A, but have done it many, many times on a Model-T. The same theory applies. I have hosted tours with 30-40 cars, and there would be 75% of the cars had manifold cookers. We would stop at a park pavilion and it would be a smorgasbord with more than enough food for everyone when it was all put on the table. We served the food right out of the cooker.

My suggestion is start by using it to only warm food that is pre-cooked. Use hot dogs for example. Put the hot dogs in a freezer bag and fill the cooker with water. When it is time for lunch, add the hot dogs to the cooker fill with bottled water. Then drive for 30 minutes. The water should be boiling and the hot dogs inside the freezer bag should be warm/hot. To branch out on this meal, add some chili inside the baggie and you have a chili dog. Then you can start branching out with your cuisine. Another simple treat is to partially fill a freezer bag with canned cherries, and add to a cooker filled with water. Drive for 15-20 minutes and stop at a convenience store for a gallon of ice cream. Find a nearby park and add the warm cherries as a topping. Another treat is line the cooker with aluminum foil and use a tube of the premade cookie dough to ½ fill the cooker. Drive until it has baked, and you have a large brownie that can be cut into sections for a mid-morning or afternoon snack. When you use the freezer bags or the aluminum foil, cleanup is easy at the park or lunch stop. As you become more advanced, soups & chili are great for Fall evening drives. The same with pre-cooking a beef stew at home and just use the cooker for heating and final cooking. Later when you turn pro at this, line the cooker with aluminum foil, then add hamburger and seasonings to make a meat loaf. Just avoid cooking raw items such as chicken until you have mastered the art of manifold cooking.
 
This interests me.

We now have a (pretty much stock/original) Model A that I drive some. For some folks my mileage would be miniscule. For others it would be a LOT. From the time I bought it in August of '25 'til winter set in around the first of the year I put 1,4xx miles on it. I plan to put a lot more miles on it before I die. I'd love to do some cooking on the engine.

Last month we drove it to a car show 350 miles from home. I'd love to have had lunch along the way in a city park or something that was cooked on the engine.

That said, I have some experience doing this, just not on an in-line engine. My 1948 Ford panel truck has had a small block Chevy engine it since the early '90s. I've baked potatoes on the manifold. I've reheated food at car shows. That is, gotten an extra "plate" at supper one evening, put it in my cooler, and reheat it on the fairgrounds for lunch the next day. I've even reheated casino shrimp out on the Bonneville salt flats the next day. That's pretty easy on a V-8 engine where you can just lay stuff on the intake manifold. Just take the stuff out of the cooler, put it on the manifold, and drive around the fairgrounds for a while. Then have a hot meal.

I'll be watching this to see what I can learn about cooking on a Model A engine. I'm envisioning welding up a "hot plate/oven" that can be slipped down over the exhaust manifold by having some "legs" pointing down.

Any pix that you all can post here would be mightily appreciated.
 
This interests me.
...
I'll be watching this to see what I can learn about cooking on a Model A engine. I'm envisioning welding up a "hot plate/oven" that can be slipped down over the exhaust manifold by having some "legs" pointing down.

Any pix that you all can post here would be mightily appreciated.


Here is the manifold cooker that Snyders sells:

A-9430-MC.jpg


Brad in Maryland
 
Back
Top