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Indian Americans were particularly enthusiastic about Instant Pot. Texasbased Urvashi Pitre’s Indian Instant Pot talks about traditional dishes that can be easily cooked using the cooker. The legendary Madhur Jaffrey also joined the party with her new Instantly Indian Cookbook.

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A statue of Denis Papin with his invention, the steam digester, was erected in Blois to honour the French inventor. His device is considered a forerunner of the modern domestic pressure cooker.

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After Robert Wang lost his job as chief scientist at a mobile messaging company he had co-founded, he shifted his focus to solving a personal problem: how to cook healthy meals fast. So and two other engineers started working in a project that birthed the Instant Pot.

Pressure cookers became an essential kitchen item when women, who did most of the cooking, realised that the cookers could both cut time spent in hot kitchens and the use of cooking fuel that was often in short supply.

People started using pressure cookers more frequently only after it was designed with a safety value that would ensure the heat buildup does not lead to an explosion.

Indumadhab Mallick’s Icmic cooker, invented around 1910, was a tiffin carrier that fitted into a larger cylinder with a coal stove below. Boiling water in the lower container made it into a steamy slow cooker.

The first time the British food writer Bee Wilson used an Instant Pot , it made her cry with joy relief. In her essay in the Women on Food anthology, she recalls coming home after a tiring day of her son’s sports and smelling the vegetable biryani she had put to cook on time delay hours earlier.As always with pressure cookers — one of Instant Pot’s many functions — when Wilson opened it, the aromas became even stronger, and the Instant Pot gave a “happy little jingle”, as most electric gadgets now do. “Some thoughtful person had been cooking, and so many hours had elapsed since I sautéed the onion and spices and put the rice and vegetables in the pot that it did not feel as if that someone had been me,” she writes.Why would an electric cooker with variable heat and timer settings elicit such emotions? Wilson studies the growth of labour-saving devices in the kitchen and finds that these appliances were both more recent and less useful than one might imagine to the women in the kitchen.For most of human history, women’s work in the kitchen was taken for granted and little was done to make it easier. Kitchen gadgets only started proliferating in the 19th century and they were more important to the (mostly) men who invented and sold them, than the women who were expected to use them, and feel grateful for their help too. In fact, Wilson notes, gadgets simply increased kitchen work for most women, not least because they were sold as replacing the work of the servants who would have shared the burden earlier.But the Instant Pot felt different. It was, writes Wilson, “a labor-saving device that factors in what a cook needs and feels.” This seems linked to its creation, which was not from a large corporation, but by an out-of-work software engineer, Robert Wang, who spent 18 months tinkering around with two other engineers to devise a product based on their real life experiences of cooking for their families — whether it was simmering stews, steaming rice, maintaining low warmth for yoghurt or boiling eggs. The Instant Pot did it all.The marketing was as low-key as its creation. It was sold on Amazon with no big advertising push. Sales built on word-of-mouth and Indian Americans were particularly enthusiastic.Desi online groups raved about the device and Urvashi Pitre, a Texas-based blogger, wrote Indian Instant Pot, which now has more than a lakh copies in print. Pitre’s Instant Pot Keto Butter Chicken, made in less than 30 minutes, was a breakout favourite. The legendary Madhur Jaffrey has joined the party with her new Instantly Indian Cookbook.Jaffrey writes that pressure cookers were familiar to all Indian cooks since “for at least the last forty years, almost every middle-class Indian household has had one, two, or even three pressure cookers whistling away.”Instant Pot built on this familiarity but allowed them to do so much more. Writing in The New Yorker in 2018, Priya Krishna described how during the previous Diwali, her aunt “ceremonially threw out all three of her pressure cookers, then went out and bought a second Instant Pot.”Now Instant Pot is launching in India, evidently hoping its success with Indian Americans can be replicated on a far wider scale. It is already here informally — Krishna writes that a representative from the company tells her that India is one of the most active countries on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group. But it still might seem a hard sell in a country where using pressure cookers come so naturally and kitchen help is still common. Given the vagaries of our electric supply and cramped kitchens, can the Instant Pot really find space here?But the just over 100 years’ history of home cookers shows us that Indians seem particularly ready to embrace these devices. The concept of cooking by steam pressure goes back to the 1670s when French physicist Denis Papin created his steam digester — a strongly sealed pot, with a later addition of a safety valve so that it could be used without fear of blowing up. In 1682, he used it to cater a meal for the Royal Society, the UK’s leading scientific institution.The diarist John Evelyn was there and marvelled at how “the hardest bones of beef, and mutton, were made as soft as cheese.”Papin’s digester was much too powerful and dangerous for home kitchens, but people worked on simpler versions. In 1918, a patent was granted to a Spanish inventor, Jose Alix Martinez, for one version meant for military catering use. In 1934, the Times of India (ToI) published an article titled “Cooking by Pressure: A Revolutionary Method”, with a diagram showing an oven-like device, with shelves for different dishes.But even before this, around 1910, the Bengali polymath Indumadhab Mallick had created a steam cooker which paved the way for eventual widespread acceptance of home cookers. The Icmic cooker, as it was called, was a tiffin carrier that fitted into a larger cylinder with a coal stove below. Water was placed in the outer cylinder, the stove lit and whole device sealed. The water boiled, condensed and boiled again, creating a steamy slow cooker.The Icmic cooker, and similar versions like Santosh and Anand cookers, were very popular. They could be left alone — since they weren’t pressurised they wouldn’t explode, and after the coal burned out, the food sat inside, ready to be eaten warm. In his memoirs, Indian diplomat BK Nehru recalled an uncle who ate only food cooked in an Icmic cooker which “produced a nourishing but not exactly cordon bleu meal.” The cookers were portable and ornithologist Salim Ali took one in the field with him for a hot meal any time of the day.In 1944, ToI published an ad extolling “Dr IM Mallik’s… scientific and hygienic cooking apparatus”. But by 1958, these devices were appearing in classified ads seeking to sell off old scrap. Yet a small group of Icmic cooker fans remained, as devoted as today’s Instant Pot users.Some years ago, when I wrote about what I thought was forgotten kitchen device, I was flooded by letters from users who still cooked in them, or really wanted to revive the practice. Now Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar, a chef who is fascinated by traditional recipes, is planning to use one in Edible Archives, the restaurant she is about to open in Goa.But the rise of pressure cookers put paid to most Icmic cookers. A version called the Automa Cooker was launched around 1935 and next year, they got a publicity boost when one of the expeditions attempting to climb Mt Everest took along pressure cookers. At high altitudes, lower air pressure makes boiling take longer so pressure cookers are a big advantage. Another advantage is their heat makes them perfect for sterilised canning, and during World War II, a major use of home pressure cookers was to preserve food for the war effort.This may have backfired though. These cookers were still not entirely safe and many children in particular had vivid memories of erupting pots. With the rapid post-War growth of the food industry and the canned and frozen foods it brought, pressure cookers came to be seen as dangerous old devices and were largely forgotten in the West. But this is when entrepreneurs in India (and other parts of the developing world, like Brazil), saw their potential in countries were processed foods were still limited and expensive.But first the safety issue had to be cracked. In TT Jagannathan’s book Disrupt and Conquer: How TTK Prestige Became a Billion Dollar Company (written with Sandhya Mendonca), he writes about how he realised that the safety valves, which were made of tin bismuth that would melt when the heat contained reached critical levels, were regularly being replaced by plugs made of material that would not, inevitably leading to bursting cookers. Jagannathan developed a fall-back design where the rubber gasket which sealed the lid would, when pressure became too high, be forced through the lid, allowing safe release of steam.Hawkins, the other big Indian pressure cooker company, also had safety deeply engrained in its development. HD Vasudeva, who started the company, had been in the general insurance business. When he thought of getting into pressure cookers, he used his contacts to research their risk aspects thoroughly. This industry focus on safety helped overcome the reluctance to use pressure cookers.As women, who did most of the cooking, realised that the cookers could both cut time spent in hot kitchens and the use of cooking fuel that was often in short supply, pressure cookers became essential items. In 1969, ToI reported how pressure cookers carried a family planning message — a 10 litre size was sold as ideal for the two child family. In 1969, ToI reported proudly how India was now exporting pressure cookers because “owing to the popularity of instant food in Western Europe”, the manufacturing of these appliances was on the decline in the region.In 1971, finance minister YB Chavan was heavily criticised for increasing tax on cookers. MPs protested that housewives used them to cook food faster so they were “a necessity both from the point of view of nutrition and the economy.” And as the flow of students leaving India to study and settle down abroad grew, the pressure cooker went with them. In his book India Moving: A History of Migration, Chinmay Tumbe notes that the one necessary item that unites Indians across all communities is the mug for toilet use, closely followed by the pressure cooker.Tumbhe also notes the creative uses made of pressure cookers. In Slovenia, an Indian doctor at an Ayurvedic centre connected his pressure cooker to a box big enough to seat a person, making a simple sauna. Less happily, in 1973 ToI reported how a young foreigner suffered severe burns from an exploding pressure cooker that he was trying to use to refine ganja into a distilled form. And there has been the constant use, across the world, of pressure cookers to make crude bombs. On the more positive side there is the possibly apocryphal story of the pressure cooker in Siachen that attracted a Pakistani heat-seeking missile away from the soldiers it was aimed at. In gratitude the jawans are said to have made a small shrine to Pressure Cooker Baba.It will be hard for Instant Pots to overcome such deep and widespread usage. Yet, the enthusiasm and creative way in which NRIs have taken to them does show how they could carve out a niche, even here in India. As the packaged food industry grows and, even more, delivery services make home cooking increasingly less essential, a generation of Indians could now be going through that shift that the West went through, where stovetop pressure cookers were seen as too cumbersome and, despite all their safety features, dangerous to use for daily cooking.Regular electricity supply is already making induction cooking more popular, and while manufacturers now sell induction compatible pressure cookers, it won’t be hard for many people to make the leap to completely electric cookers , with all their advantages of variable heat and time settings. It is telling how Indian manufacturers have already launched Instant Pot equivalents, so the original is likely to find at least some demand. Perhaps it could invoke the history of Mallick and how he helped create the culture which has made Indians always ready to take cookers into their kitchens.