Country Lore: The Joys of Pressure Cooking

Over our 30 years of living in the city and the country, we have used several pressure cookers to prepare almost all of our food. In fact, it was handed down as a cooking method from both Mom and Grandma.

We do not live at an excessively high altitude where a pressure cooker is necessary to attain proper boiling temperatures. Instead, we use it mainly because it lets us enjoy great tasting food made in record time, and it limits our carbon footprint. We hear of people cooking down a stew for hours and laugh at what their fuel bill must be, when a pressure cooker can do the same job in a fraction of the time. In general, cooking with a pressure cooker takes about one third the time of standard cooking.

Grandma’s vocabulary did not include global warming, but losing everything in war-torn Europe turned her into a serious conservationist. With fuel prices escalating and the threat of global disaster looming, it behooves us to find ways to conserve energy. Pressure cooking is a great way to be energy conscious in the kitchen and provide healthy meals. For interested readers, we would be delighted to give any advice required to convert people to the joys of cooking this way.

Paul and Suzanne Ramoundos
Oakland, Maryland

If you have tips to share or questions for the Ramoundos, go to the Mother Earth News Pressure Cooker discussion. — Mother