Who knew! The inventor of the slow cooker Crock Pot was Jewish! Bring on the Cholent!
Irving Naxon (born Irving Nachumsohn) invented the crock pot, the then-called Naxon Beanery. He retired in 1971 and sold his business to Rival Manufacturing. They streamlined the design, renamed it the crock pot.
It all started with Naxon’s mother, Tamara Kaslovski Nachumsohn who grew up in a small shtetl in Lithuania. She told Naxon, when he was a young child, that when she was growing up back in the old country, each Friday afternoon her mother would send her to the local bakery with their pot of prepared but yet uncooked “cholent.” It was her job in Vilnius to deliver the cholent pot to the village bakery before Shabbat. There it would be put into the oven for a full day, while the family observed the Sabbath and the hot oven cooled to warm while not in use for that same period. At sundown she would go to the bakery and bring the family their delicious pot of steamy stew.
Naxon remembered the story and was inspired to find a way to create a heating element that surrounded the pot in the same way that an oven would have. He wanted to find a low cost, low electricity use solution and voila!
Photo: Naxon’s Daughter, Lenore Naxon
