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The prohibition against baking includes all kinds of cooking, or thermal treatment of food, that is, boiling, frying, roasting, stewing, grilling, microwaving, etc. And yet, enjoying a hot meal is considered an essential part of celebrating Sabbath. How does it all square? Well, the trick is to prepare a hot meal on Friday and then keep it warm until serving it during Sabbath. The key here is to make sure that the dishes are fully cooked before Friday sunset; all you can do afterwards is to maintain their constant temperature. Once Sabbath starts, stirring is not allowed as it's part of the cooking process. So is adding any new ingredients, unless they are already cooked as well (rabbis assume that something which is already fully cooked cannot be cooked even more). Even such simple tasks as brewing coffee or tea counts as "cooking" (it is allowed, though, to add hot water to a coffee or tea essence which has been brewed in advance).
All this has led to the tradition of cooking cholent for Sabbath. ''Cholent'' is a one-pot meal consisting of beef(typically brisket, a cheap cut from the front part of the animal), ''kishke'' (see [[Of This Ye Shall Not Eat for It Is an Abomination#Blood|previous post]]), pearl barley, legumes (chickpeas, lentils, beans, etc.), potatoes, onions and hard-boiled eggs. All of this is covered with water or stock and seasoned generously with garlic, salt, pepper, etc. In the past, Jewish housewives would take thus prepared cholent, in a special metal container, to their local bakery, where the dish would stew slowly in a well-heated bread oven. They would return to retrieve the ready dish on the following day, just before dinner.
Below is a cholent recipe from ''Kochbuch für Israelitische Frauen'' (''Cookbook for Israelite Women''), a German-language kosher cookbook by Rebekka Wolff, first published in 1851. Its anonymous Polish translation was published in 1877 under the somewhat misleading title, ''Polska kuchnia koszerna'' (''Polish Kosher Cuisine'').
