In a universe of kitchen gadgets that promise to do 20 things at once, there’s something appealing about a device that does just one thing and does it well: cooking food “slow and low” with minimal oversight necessary.

“Slow cookers are a gateway to get people to cook from scratch again,” says Georgia-based chef and James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Hugh Acheson, who is also about to release a whole cookbook dedicated to the simple devices, The Chef and the Slow Cooker. “My philosophy in this book is to convince people that cooking should be fun, and not arduous.”

Created in the 1930s by an inventor from Chicago, the slow cooker really took off when the patent was purchased in 1970 by Rival, which still makes the best-known version, the Crock-Pot. The electric pot was perfect for women who were streaming into the workforce, since after a little prep in the morning, they could leave it running all day and come home to a hot, home-cooked meal.

“I remember walking into my house and it being filled with scents of rich brisket, caramel carrots, and yellow onion cooking in my mom’s Crock-Pot,” says Benjamin Goldman, now the executive chef at trendy Miami Southeast Asian spot Komodo. “As she would get ready for work, she’d pack the pot with meat, vegetables, and aromatics. That way by the time we’d get home from Jewish day school, the brisket was falling apart.”