Catherine Phipps - Modern Pressure Cooking: The Comprehensive Guide to Stovetop and Electric Cookers, with Over 200 Recipes

Pressure cookers have been around for a long time. It is over 340 years since Denis Papin first presented his steam digester, an ingenious invention that created a pressurized build up of steam inside a weighted, sealed vessel. There have been many manifestations since and they have fallen in and out of fashion, no more so than in the last 7080 years. When I first started writing about them over a decade ago, persuading people away from outdated negative preconceptions was often difficult but in the interim years my job has become easier. This is in part due to familiarity some of our most prominent chefs have talked about them being a secret weapon in their professional kitchens, they have started to appear regularly on TV shows such as MasterChefand certain brands of electric pressure cookers have become so popular they have achieved cult status. I am hopeful that at last the UK has started to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to understanding their value that it is becoming fairly well accepted that a modern pressure cooker is a safe, efficient and easy-to-use piece of equipment and that the food cooked within is a pleasure to eat.

For me, the joy of pressure cooking is the fact that I am able to cook properly from scratch, but in a fast, convenient and sustainable way. This feels increasingly important when addressing some of the challenges of modern living we all face and cooking can be just one more thing we have to do on a difficult day when we are time-pressed, stressed and over-tired. Most of us are worried about climate change and are trying to navigate our way through the endless debates on how to be sustainable, and food is often at the centre of these debates. We know that a diet high in ultra-processed foods is really bad for us and that we should be cooking much more than many of us do. I believe that being a modern cook paradoxically involves winding the clock back to a time before eating ultra-processed food was the norm and cooking properly again but with the added benefit of a much wider range of ingredients to work with and more mod cons to make us more efficient. We need to be mindful of what we cook but also how we cook it. I would struggle to do this to the extent I do without the help of a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker helps you in the kitchen by saving you time (cutting off around 70% of the cooking time), making certain processes easier, reducing your fuel bill by a quite staggering amount, as well as being much greener as your consumption will be so much lower. It will also reduce your water consumption considerably. In short, it is a very sustainable option in the kitchen. This is in addition to the benefits in terms of flavour and nutrition. Meat will be tender, flavours will intensify, vegetables will keep their colour and vitality as well as maintaining a higher nutritional value than their conventionally cooked counterparts. There is no compromise on flavour as the flavour will be better.

In a novel by one of my favourite writers, Joan Aiken, the resilient and practical heroine reaches for her pressure cooker and says in an aside that she never goes far without one. This is me. I am writing this from a coastal holiday cottage. The weather is typical English summer holiday weather changeable, frequently wet and grey. We often return from a days outing, uncomfortably damp, if not sodden, needing comfort and warmth from the food we eat, which is why I bring the pressure cooker. It means I can quickly whip up fast soups, pastas and rice dishes without resorting to processed food. But lest you think pressure cookers are a cold-weather tool, for comfort food only, let me catch you up with those in hotter climates who understand that they are indispensable because shorter cooking times mean cooler kitchens. In warmer weather they are put to good use preparing eggs, meat for cold cuts, potatoes, pulses and grains for salads, lightly steaming vegetables. If were lucky enough to be able to get good seafood, we can use them for a seafood boil too. I know people who take them camping (it makes sense as you will conserve gas or wood), they are beloved in boating communities where fuel and water are always at a premium and they are necessary if you want to cook anything at a high altitude.

This book is aimed at people who want to cook. I feel it is important to say this right from the start; a pressure cooker isnt a replacement for the hands-on mechanics of cooking, it just speeds up part of the process. Therefore, while there are a lot of one-pot recipes and even a few dishes where you can put minimally prepped ingredients into the cooker and that is all you need to do, the majority of the recipes do require some preparation on your part prior to pressure cooking. To really get the most out of them you need to think about how they might help you at times when you might not have considered using them. For example, lets take a traditional roast dinner. Even if you are roasting the meat in your oven (and you can do it in the pressure cooker if you want to, see ), the pressure cooker can help you with other elements. You can par-boil the potatoes and parsnips in the pressure cooker, you can cook the sides (greens, numerous other vegetables) in moments, you may have made the stock for your gravy in itand even if you arent saving a massive amount of time and fuel with this, every little helps and quickly adds up.