Today’s trip down memory lane was prompted by a Facebook post in which someone asked what foods we had as children were so awful in our memories that we never eat them as adults. I wasn’t the only one who nominated tripe, which is really as tough as gristle unless it’s cooked to death – a process that certainly tenderizes it but probably removes all nutritional benefit. I have written before about tripe , and in the Old City of Montevideo there’s a restaurant, El Copacabana on Sarandi, where in winter only, one day a week they serve a delicious cazuela mondongo, a soupy kind of casserole dish featuring many kinds of vegetables with panceta, lentils, beans and chunks of tripe.
The notion of cooking tripe to death in a pressure cooker prompted me to think about how Mum used hers. These were very popular pieces of cooking equipment in the 1950s household I grew up in, and may still be today, though I don’t know, as none of my friends have ever mentioned one. Today I found this great little video clip that explains how a pressure cooker works if you don’t already know, because it is relevant!
When I was little, Australian cuisine was very ‘British’ in style and vegetables in particular had to be very well cooked – we had no idea about the beautiful Asian way of lightly stir frying veggies chopped into small pieces of different sizes so they all come to desired degree of readiness together in the same pot, skillet or wok. So this meant that veggies were either ‘fresh’ before cooking (often straight from our garden) or came out of a tin or Fowlers Vacola jar. And actually we had tinned peas and beans a lot; and tinned asparagus spears though expensive, were sometimes served in salads or aparagus rolls when Mum was being a bit posh. In those decades following WWII, like many house owners, Dad put a fair bit of time into gardening to produce food, so we had plenty of silver beet, carrots, tomatoes, peas, beans, cabbages, cauliflowers and various pumpkins and squash. Potatoes, turnips and onions were mostly bought.
I’m sure I was very young, perhaps aged 4 or 5 when Mum acquired her pressure cooker, and Gran already had one. They both used them a lot, daily, in cooking family meals. But I’ve never had one, and never wanted one either, for two reasons:
- My memories of pressure cooked veggies are miserable. The cooker had three metal baskets that sat inside, generally with different veggies in each one. So for example, baskets of diced carrots and bigger chunks of potatoes might be joined by a basket of chopped cabbage or pieces of cauliflower. As they were all cooked for the same time, the potatoes were just right, the carrots a bit soft but ‘ok’ (and we didn’t know any better) but the resulting cabbage or cauliflower was grey and soggy. The cauli was often so soft that a knife placed on edge on top to ‘cut it’ could sink down without any pressure being applied. In effect, more often than not in Mum’s hands a pressure cooker was an anti-nutrition device.
- I find the whole concept of a pressue cooker a bit terrifying, probably because of the hissing cloud of steam that followed lifting the pressure valve stopper, which you had to do before unlocking the lid. We all knew that without that step, the lid would fly off and could kill someone, or at least make a hole in the wall. You had to move the cooker off the heat and wait for it to cool ‘enough’ – determined by lifting the stopper just a little bit to see if it was ready to remove completely….hisssss, psssst. I also vividly recall how one day, someone, probably Mum, removed the pressure valve too soon after taking it off the hotplate, and stringy bits of cooked rhubarb shot up through the steam escape onto the ceiling and wall near the stove, from where they draped and dripped down in a pink, sticky mess.