Whistles from the Indian kitchen

Kitchen gadgets come and go, but the pressure cooker goes on forever.  Brian de Souza finds out that the appliance is selling more than ever before

Remember the high-pitched whistle from the kitchen when you mother cooked your meal; didn’t you swear then that you would go in for more hi-tech ways of cooking rather than use old fashioned contraptions like the pressure cooker. Well, here’s news for you. Pressure cookers are selling more than ever before and what is more, now come in different styles. For an Indian, a pressure cooker continues to be a must-have appliance, whether they live in India or abroad.

Anupam Desai, 24, a Master’s student of Accounting and Financial Management in Melbourne, Australia had a problem.

He shares a flat off-campus with three other Indian classmates and was finding it difficult to cook for all of them with the three-litre pressure cooker he had brought from India.

So when one of his mates went back home on a holiday, Desai asked him to bring along a larger, five-litre cooker. “Thanks to our hectic schedules, dinner is the main meal of the day,” Desai said. “So we cook black eyed peas, vegetables and good old rajma. With a pressure cooker, you save time.”

The pressure cooker is a must-have for Indian students going overseas and has even made it to the University of Maryland’s checklist for Indian students. Kiranbhai Shah, a distributor of pressure cookers says, “The small 2-litre ones, especially, are popular amongst students going abroad.”

Despite the advent of the microwave, the pressure cooker continues to hold its own and among all so-called labour saving devices, arguably ranks right on top.

No wonder penetration levels for pressure cookers is the highest among the highest in Indian households, government surveys indicate, after bicycles and transistors.

The market for pressure cookers is estimated at Rs 600 crore. According to Franci Kanoi, a research agency, about  9 million units are sold.  Hawkins, one of the big brands sold 18.6 lakh pressure cookers in fiscal 2006-07-that’s 23 percent more than last year.

Traditionally made of aluminium with a flat bottom and an outer lid, the pressure cooker today comes in a variety of colours and some innovations to boot.

Last year, TTK Prestige launched its Nakshatra line which features an inner-lid or “airline” door and comes with round bottoms. Cookers with such inner-lids are safer and more efficient than the outer lid variety. Available in several colours, these hundi-shaped, non-stick products quickly became popular in the market. Sales of these kind account for two-thirds of all pressure cooker sales, sources said.

Typically, a family may even have a pressure khadai, pressure pans, pressure Handis as manufacturers get more innovative to woo more buyers. In terms of colours, pressure cookers are available in colours ranging from Flame red, Teal Blue to Royal Black, a far cry from the dull grey of yore.

Many Indians find the pressure cooker indispensable because food gets cooked faster and it is easy to clean it. It’s also useful when cooking certain dishes. In Bengali households, steaming the hilsa can be done perfectly using a pressure cooker. A Chembur-based businessman uses a pressure cooker to make his favourite avial.

Market research indicates that north-Indians typically prefer round-bottom if they wish to make biriyani. South Indian joint families, on other hand buy the bigger 8 to 12 litre cookers. The outer-lid ones are not quite popular in north India.

Corporate caterers like Radhakrishna Hospitality which cater to hospitals and offshore rigs typically use the 22 litre “big boy” Hawkins to make food ranging from dals to meat.

The cookers however can bemuse foreigners when used by Indians-typically, they have fears of the vessel exploding. That possibly explains why one US buyer also bought a copy of Pressure Cookers for Dummies along with her India-made pressure cooker. In a posting on the internet, she wrote: “My pressure cooker feels very solid, and the safety features are reassuringly comprehensive. The instruction book goes over everything you need to know so thoroughly that it made the cooker sound much harder to use than it really is. It is now my favourite kitchen tool.”

Linda Bonamis, a Mumbai-based executive, who migrated to Canada over a decade ago recalls that her pressure cooker remained behind in the luggage they forgot to take along. “I was devastated since I couldn’t live without it when in India, but I had to make do without it,” she said. Her troubles ended two years later, when her husband came to Mumbai on holiday and brought back the cooker.  Life was now back to normal.  

d_brian@dnaindia.net