Sass - Cooking Under Pressure (ition)

This book is dedicated to all those who want to eat better and fasterwith the wish that time saved in food preparation will be spent relaxing around the dinner table with family and friends.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition is dedicated to those who want to slash cooking time, save fuel, and conserve all of our planets precious resources.

There is a gadget on the market that permits a cook to scoff at time. It is a pressure cooker....

IRMA S. ROMBAUER , The Joy of Cooking, 1946

I would like to express my gratitude to my mother, who went to India and brought back a pressure cooker instead of a sari. Without her particular set of priorities, this book might never have been born.

I am also grateful to my dear friends who endured months of hearing my voice on an answering machine while I was under pressure developing recipes. Many of these same friends (plus some new ones) became charter members of the Pressure Cooker Elves Club, an organization originally established to retest the recipes in this book and now composed of ardent converts to the pleasures of pressure cookery. They include: Pat Baird, Judy Bloom, Ann Brady, Joyce Curwin, Marilyn Einhorn, Suzanne Hamlin, Dana Jacobi, Bill Kelly, Rose Keough, Bob and Bridget Lyons, Charmian Reading, Steve Schmidt, and Rebecca Wood. Hearty thanks to you all!

And special thanks to:

Ann Bramson, senior editor at William Morrow, for recognizing the value of this project long before the pressure began to build, and for her enthusiasm over the past year.

Laurie Orseck, project editor at William Morrow, for being so responsive to my requests, and for revising under pressure with such grace.

Helene Berinsky, for creating a book design that reflects the fun, excitement, and contemporaneity of pressure cooking.

Pat Baird, Bev Bennett, and Steve Schmidt for reading and commenting on the completed manuscript.

Bobby Troka, neighbor and friend, for providing a second home for a very spunky Burmese kitten who understood nothing about deadlines.

Richard Esposito for designing the type of kitchen that inspires creativity, and for holding my hand throughout a typically painful renovation.

Phyllis Wender, my agent, for taking the book contract with her on vacation.

Paula Wolfert, Suzanne Hamlin, Mayburn Kass, and Ceri Hadda for paving the way with their articulate enthusiasm for pressure cookery.

All of the pressure cooker manufacturersAeternum, BRA, Chantal, Cuisinart, Hawkins Futura, Kuhn-Rikon, Mirro, Presto, and T-Falwho shared their time, knowledge, and cookware so generously.

For this Twentieth Anniversary Edition, I am deeply grateful to David Sweeney, who did so much to promote this book when it first appeared and championed its return to print. Thank you, Cassie Jones, for enthusiastically adopting my baby and for bringing a fresh eye to the manuscript. Thanks also to Nicole Martella for so efficiently fielding requests, and to the rest of the team at William Morrow Cookbooks, including Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, Tavia Kowalchuk, Kim Lewis, and Paula Szafranski.

As this special twentieth anniversary edition of Cooking Under Pressure goes to press, Mrs. Rombauers claim that the pressure cooker allows the cook to scoff at time is even more relevant than it was when she penned those words more than sixty years ago: Because this magical appliance cooks food so quickly, it helps us conserve fuel as well as time. Because the cooker does such a great job of tenderizing tough cuts of meat, it saves us money.

Over the past two decades, my enthusiasm for pressure cooking has not faded. In fact, as Ive learned more and more about the advantages of cooking under pressure, I have come to believe even more firmly that there is no better way to prepare a hearty soup, a soulful stew, or a delectable risotto in a flash. And arent such homemade dishes what we long for in this era of multitasking and eating on the run?

The original edition of Cooking Under Pressure was so successful that I saw no reason to make any significant alterations of content or tone. Rather, I focused on lowering the fat in the recipesone or two tablespoons rather than the formerly popular three or fourand reducing the amount of liquid since the cookers now available require less to come up to pressure. Ive also inserted some useful techniques acquired since 1989.

I am delighted that Cooking Under Pressure is once again available to those who have been pressure cooking for decades and to those about to discover its many delights for the first time.

It is with great pride and pleasure that I serve it forth.

LORNA SASS

New York City

W hen I told my father that I was writing a pressure cooker cookbook, he recalled that on the day I was brought home from the hospital, some relatives unexpectedly appeared to meet the new baby. It was right around dinner time, and the year was 1945.

He and my grandmother turned right to the trusty pressure cooker, knowing that they could produce a meal in minutes: first some lentil soup (10 minutes), followed by stewed chicken (9 minutes) and potatoes and green beans (4 minutes). Then individual custards pressure-steamed in ramekins (5 minutes) for dessert.

Clearly the pressure cookerwith its ability to produce a tasty and nutritious meal in 30 minutes or lesshas always had a great deal to offer the time-conscious cook. So it seems particularly odd that by the late fifties, some 45 million pressure cookers were unaccountably stowed away in attics and forgotten.

Perhaps home cooks were lured away by the ease and seeming glamour of TV dinners and other convenience foods. Perhaps there was just one story too many about a careless cook who ended up with split peas on the kitchen ceiling.

In Europe, India, and North Africawhere great value has always been placed on the kind of hearty soups and succulent stews that nurture the soulthe pressure cooker has never suffered a dramatic decline, and its not uncommon to see two or three different sizes being used simultaneously to prepare dinner. Indeed, many of the dozen or so brands now available in this country are manufactured abroad. With their striking, sleek new designs and multiple safety features, they look right at home in the contemporary American kitchen.

I began thinking about pressure cookers when my mother carted one home from India in 1987 and asked to borrow a cookbook on the subject. To my surprise, I couldnt find any in my vast library of old books, and when she went searching in bookstores, she couldnt find any current ones either.

My mother had always been a bit ahead of her time, so I wasnt all that surprised when a few months later I read the headline Look Whats Back: The Pressure Cooker in the September 1987 issue of Food & Wine. The article sang the praises of pressure cookery and rated the top five readily available brands. Pressure cookers have returned to the well-equipped kitchen, wrote equipment specialist Mardee Haidin Regan, not as collectibles from decades gone by, but as a nutritionally sound, fast and efficient means of preparing food.

The New York Times agreed. Pressure cookers are making a comeback, declared Marian Burros in her column, Eating Well (February 3, 1988). There is no clear explanation of why they ever went out of fashion, she continued, but now they are particularly appealing because they make it possible to cook many healthful foods like dried beans and peas in a very short time.