This column ends well, with an ideal pan of beans, cooked in a third of the usual time, using less than a third of the usual energy. This column began decades ago, when I decided I was afraid of pressure cookers. Raking back though unreliable memories, it isn’t clear why, exactly, I was afraid. We didn’t have one at home, and relatives who did weren’t using them any more by the time we were growing up. There was no incident in the house next door, no scaremongering public-information film that had lodged itself in my mind. Unexplained fear became a quiet hang-up to which I clung even as pressure cookers evolved dramatically. Some of the best cooks I know told me to get over it.
Actually, this column began with a French physicist, Denis Papin. Born near Blois in 1647, he studied medicine before moving to Paris, where he assisted the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens in building vacuum pumps. Later, in England, Papin worked with the physicist Robert Boyle – whose pressure and volume of gas theory is known as Boyle’s Law – and built air pumps for the Royal Society of London. Papin’s research explored the relationship between boiling temperature and the surrounding pressure. When you cook in an ordinary pot at atmospheric pressure, water boils at 100C until it escapes as steam. Inside a sealed vessel, however, the trapped steam molecules move faster, increasing the surrounding pressure, which means the water boils at 121C. In 1679, Papin demonstrated a sensational invention: a closed vessel with a tight-fitting lid in which steam under pressure was used to cook food and soften bones; his “digesting engine”. One featurewas a small, weighted piston that moved up and released steam; a pressure-relief valve – and the original model for all modern pressure-cookers.
The model needed work, though. Two centuries would pass before a domestic version of Papin’s digesting engine was patented and its potential was realised: to reform daily life, save fuel and time, make cooking easier, reduce waste and foster collective meal preparation. The 1940s saw a surge in use. Sadly, that success was badly timed, because metal previously destined for household uses was redirected to the war effort (resulting in alternative cheap postwar pressure cookers, which gained a reputation for blowing off their lids). Seventy years later, and pressure cookers have evolved into miracles, and the best cooks I know are asking: “Haven’t you got one yet?” and I am stuck in 1949.
Or I was. Step in Catherine Phipps, who has rigorously championed pressure cooking for a decade, and whose manifesto on the process has just been updated. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read the introduction; the how, the why and the which, the essays and the recipes. She elaborates: “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 … reducing fuel bills and water consumption by a staggering amount.” She emphasises that not only is the modern pressure cooker safe, efficient and easy to use, but that the food cooked within it is a pleasure to eat.
Also step in my partner Vincenzo, who, before meeting me, had been devoted to his pressure cooker. I asked why he hadn’t bought one for us, or encouraged me to use one, to overcome my fear. He replied that he had, on various occasions, and that I was stubborn. That night, I soaked 500g borlotti beans. The next morning, we drove to his parents to borrow their pressure cooker (which I must note is an Italian model, and slightly different from those Phipps writes about, so with different timings, but the inspiration was all her).
I put the beans on at noon, brought the pan up to pressure, the piston moved up and released steam, then they cooked for 20 minutes on the lowest flame.
This column ends with an ideal pan of beans (tender and fat, double the quantity of the dried ones I’d begun with, and surrounded by glorious bean broth), cooked in a third of the time, using less than a third of the energy than usual. I pulled half from the pan, dressed them with olive oil and salt, and ate them with marinated red peppers (from a jar) and toast. I kept the rest for pressure-cooker minestrone, but more about that next week.
