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Pressure cooking saves fuel, retains nutrients and requires less salt
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Healthy option Pressure cooking kills germs
The pressure cooker is indispensable in the Indian kitchen. The staples of Indian diet, rice and dal, take nearly an hour to cook in a traditional pot, but require only a few minutes in a pressure cooker. Many traditional Indian recipes are now adapt
able to the cooker.
Invented in 1679 by Denis Papin, a French physicist, who called it a “steam digester”, the earliest cookers were bulky and served only in the laboratory and in the food industry. In 1938, Alfred Vishchler introduced his first Flex-Seal Speed cooker designed for home use and the pressure cooker finally made it to the kitchen. The fuel shortages of World War II made the fuel-efficient pressure cooker very popular. After the 1950s, the pressure cooker became less necessary in America, but it remained popular in India and other developing countries with perennially high fuel prices.
Pressure cookers work on the principle that water boils at a higher temperature when subjected to high pressure. The higher temperatures enable faster cooking and create fuel savings. Using a separator rack, one can cook several dishes simultaneously.
Apart from saving fuel, pressure-cooking also saves nutrients. Steaming conserves nutrients better. The use of small quantity of water in a sealed environment prevents the boiling-away of vitamins. The super-hot temperatures intensify natural flavours, and dishes require less salt, sugar and seasonings. While boiling kills many germs, pressure-cooking kills spores that resist boiling at 100 degree Celsius.
At higher altitudes, where water boils at temperatures lower than 100 degree Celsius and leaves many foods incompletely cooked, the pressure cooker is a godsend. Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle describes how in the mountainous republic of Mendoza “the pot was left on the fire all night, and next morning it was boiled again, but yet the potatoes were not cooked.” A Papin’s Digester would have been much helpful then.
Many people in the West shied away from pressure cookers in the 1950s. Apart from falling fuel prices, the fear that cookers could blow up led to declining use. Modern pressure cookers, if used according to the instruction manual, almost never blow up. Commonest reasons for blow-ups include overloading the cooker and poor maintenance of gaskets and sealing rings.
RAJIV. M
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