That is a Crock Grill with the burner and grill missing. I had one back in the early 2000s. The hole is for where the burner plugs into the power supply/thermostat thing. Was actually a great cooking implement, and you should try to find the rest of the parts.
Edit : heres a link to an eBay listing of the model I had.
People just can't resist the urge to say something, even if it's useless. Especially if it's useless. (Even me, here I am saying something.)
But in this particular community, if you don't actually know with certainty what something is it doesn't seem to hard to just shut the fuck up. There's no value whatsoever in conjecture. I had no idea what the hell this thing was but I was interested to find out, but I sure as hell didn't feel the need to speculate...
Engagement helps posts in various algorithms, though I'm not sure that Lemmy uses comments for Hot or anything else. More importantly, I think there's truth to the meme that the quickest way to get an answer to your question on the internet isn't to ask the question, it's to tell someone else the wrong answer. People will then chime in with the right answer if they know it. Wrong answers can be useful in that respect.
Eh, guessing is fun and you could only know by having had one. I did enjoy just how silly some of the wrong answers were. This might be the first time I was the only one who knew a thing, too, so that was cool.
I love that they call it smokeless. Sure it is, as long as you never cook anything in it! All you need is a drop of grease or juice from your food to drip on the element and it smoked. Mine had an aluminum reflector/liner in the bottom that stained like a bitch. I stopped using it because it was too much of a headache to keep clean.