Modern Pressure Cooking: The Comprehensive Guide to Stovetop and Electric Cookers, with Over 200 Recipes

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The pressure cooker is the number one gadget for people who want to slice huge chunks off the cooking time of meat, pulses and sauces. From ribs that fall off the bone, to stew, casserole or braised meat, a pressure cooker can achieve great results in under an hour. Pasta and rice can be made from scratch in less than 10 minutes; thrifty cooks can tenderise flavoursome cheap cuts in just 20 minutes and pulses can be cooked without having to soak them. Speed isn't the only advantage of pressure cookers - they also preserve nutrients and vitamins, as well as being a more economical way to cook. Adding bicarbonate of soda to bean cooking water helps them soften. When it comes to softening beans, (a little) bicarb is good, sugar and acid are bad. A small amount of bicarb definitely speeds up cooking, but don’t add too much or it will make the beans taste soapy. Salt also seems to speed up cooking slightly, and it’s great for flavour. Because sugar and acid are bad news for cooking beans, when making beans in tomato sauce, don’t add tomatoes (which are sweet and sour) until the beans are well and truly soft. The upside is that the tomatoes should stop the beans collapsing further. True, I was lured by the one-step Buttery Tomato Soup (10 mins under pressure) and the promise of 1-Minute Green Soup, but more importantly I am resolved to overcome my childishness in feeling desolately left out of the process of cooking once the lid is sealed on, and immerse myself in recipes that give me a little to do, too, and in the process gain experience and ease. After all, whatever way you cook, repetition (which leads to relaxed familiarity) is the greatest teacher.

If you’re well past that (me too), the good news is that starting later still reaps rewards: switching to an optimal diet at 60 could add eight years, and even making the change at 80 could mean an extra three years on your life expectancy.

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There are lidded pudding basins that are metallic and plastic pudding basins, I don't really trust the latter as the lids have been known to warp under pressure. Traditionally, Christmas puddings are boiled on the stovetop for 8 hours, continuously releasing steam into your kitchen and having to keep an eye on the water level. The publishing industry until very recently has seemed to agree – there is a real dearth of decent books on the subject, though there are a huge number on slow cookers – why? When I started using a pressure cooker, I found myself reliant on the accompanying recipe booklet, an old Marguerite Patten from the 1970s which is unsurprisingly very out of date, and an American title by Laura Sass, Pressure Perfect, which is great if you can be faffed with all the cup measurements and is unsurprisingly good on beans. More recent is Australian Suzanne Gibbs' recent book which has some very fresh tasting dishes, such as this version of a tagine here. However, I am more excited by the fact that Grub Street have recognised that pressure cookers are woefully under represented, and have therefore commissioned Marguerite Patten to update her 1970s book to reflect modern eating habits – the book will focus more on pulses, grains, stews and soups and will be released as one of the Basic Basics Handbooks sometime in April. The blurb before the actual recipe is essential reading and it's laid out that way precisely so that you get all the information you need before you dive in. Please note that this post is long so that you have every single detail you might need in one place as every year there are a lot of questions about how to pressure cook a Christmas Pudding and I don't want to be sending you around in circles.

As any pressure-cooker enthusiast — or perhaps, post-Instant Pot, I should say pressure-cooker evangelist — will tell you, there is almost nothing you can’t cook in one, and very often, not merely faster than by using traditional methods, but with better results, too. Catherine Phipps is an altogether calmer exponent: “This book”, she states in her introduction, “is aimed at people who want to cook. I feel it is important to say this right from the start; a pressure cooker isn’t a replacement for the hands-on mechanics of cooking; it just speeds up part of the process.”In Catherine’s family, they place a sprig of holly on the top, foil-wrapped so not to put it directly in the pudding as it’s toxic. The high alcohol content means that, as long as the pudding is stored properly, it can keep for a long time. It gets better: pulses are also a rich source of resistant starch, fermentable fibre that is great for a healthy gut, and which may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. That resistant starch may be good for our brains too, with recent research suggesting that by boosting our intestinal microbiota, it can improve cognition through the brain-gut axis, and even our moods.

Simply put your dried fruit in the pressure cooker and add whatever liquid your recipe calls for. A general rule of thumb is 500g dried fruit needs around 150ml liquid to just cover it. If you leave it on keep warm for a few hours, that temperature will of course drop down. Substitutions You can use any recipe you like for Christmas Pudding, they all steam in the same way - just use the timing guide below for the different sizes of pudding basins. Jump to: You can leave your pressure cooker Christmas Pudding on Warm in your electric pressure cooker as long as you want really.

DOES IT HAVE TO BE CRANBERRY GLAZED?

With 150 delicious recipes and beautiful colour photography throughout the Pressure Cooker Cookbook will revolutionise your mealtimes.