I'm not the biggest sucker for kitchen gear. It takes me nigh on years to decide whether to buy a new tool, to ferment over whether it will get enough use to make it a worthwhile investment or just be another flashy gewgaw cluttering a cupboard until the next time I hit eBay. I think I'd been considering buying a pressure cooker for at least five years before committing. It's indispensable. As always, I feel like a fool for not acting earlier.

As a mode of cooking, cooking under pressure is a recent innovation. French physicist Denis Papin invented the device, which he named the "digester" in 1679. Prior to his invention of the safety valve, explosions were common. The benefits to cooking English food were however seen immediately. Horticulturalist John Evelyn recorded a demonstration of Papin's device for the Royal Society in 1682. He writes:

I went this afternoon with several of the Royal Society to a supper which was all dressed, both fish and flesh, in Monsieur Papin's digestors, by which the hardest bones of beef itself, and mutton, were made as soft as cheese, without water or other liquor, and with less than eight ounces of coals, producing an incredible quantity of gravy; and for close of all, a jelly made of the bones of beef, the best for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that I had ever seen, or tasted. We eat pike and other fish bones, and all without impediment; but nothing exceeded the pigeons, which tasted just as if bak’d in a pie, all these being stewed in their own juice without any addition of water save what swam about in the Digester...The philosophical supper caused much mirth amongst us and exceedingly pleased the company. I sent a glass of jelly to my wife, to the reproach of all that the ladies ever made of the best hartshorn

My aims are less lofty than rending bones as soft as cheddar, as tempting as that sounds and not many of the women that I know would be duly impressed if I sent them a glass of meat-flavoured jelly. They probably wouldn't be surprised either.

My attraction to pressure cooking is the speed. Pressure cookers work by trapping the steam created by boiling water, increasing the pressure inside the vessel. As the pressure rises, so too does the boiling point of the water (to around 120oC) which reduces cooking time. As much as I love spending hours slow cooking and braising; I'm also a fan of eating at least one meal before midnight.

The danger of explosion has disappeared. Older pressure cookers were capped with a regulator, that hissed and rattled as the pressure rose, occasionally exploding when a chunk of food got wedged into the valve. Mine is a little more modern: the regulator is built into the handle and there seems to be multiple relief valves to stop myself blowing the kitchen apart in a massive steam explosion if the regulator failed. Unlike the pressure cookers that I remember from my childhood, it's virtually silent. 

As for what to cook, the pressure cooker has lead me back to Indian food. Dal cooks in ten minutes; chickpeas in under 20. You can turn out a curry in under an hour. I'm still working to get the consistency right - pressured cooked food does not reduce as much as slow-cooking the same recipe. But the cooker isn't going to end up in an online auction any time soon.