Pressure Cookers Known In Seventeenth Century

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27012, 22 February 1949, Page 2

Pressure Cookers Known In Seventeenth Century

“Actually, it is wrong to suppose that pressure cooking is one of the many marvels of the twentieth century,” writes Miss Marguerite Patten, one of Britain’s leading domestic science experts. “It was devised, although certainly not extensively used, in the seventeenth century. There is an interesting paragraph in John Evelyn’s diary, which was brought to my notice the other day by a friend, and I pass it on to you, as I think you will be as interested as I was. " John Evelyn mentions how, on April 12, 1682, he went to a supper with several members of the Royal Society, where all the food, both fish and flesh, had been cooked in a digester with less than Boz of coal. The digester was really a large saucepan with an airtight lid fitted with a safety valve. Evelyn says that the hardest bones were made as soft as cheese, that the food was delicious, and that this philosophical supper caused mirth amongst us.”