“Emergency sponge pudding” with either golden syrup or jam at the bottom became my children’s most-requested dessert because once it was mixed, it could be ready in five minutes. In fact, steaming puddings is one of the best uses of the microwave oven, as I discovered when I finally bought one. She wraps it in foil and heats it in the Aga or the oven.” Microwaved puddings are frequently ruined … Delia doesn’t even reheat her leftover pudding in the microwave. As recently as 2018, someone wrote to to ask whether it was possible to heat a Christmas pudding in the microwave, and the website’s food editor replied: “Steaming is definitely best. How could good food ever emerge from a white plastic box? My mother was a faithful Delia Smith fan, and you never saw Delia cooking with a microwave. “You can tell it’s been microwaved,” my parents would say in disapproving tones if we went to a restaurant and were served a portion of lasagne which was hotter than normal. In my family, we didn’t see microwaving as cooking at all. I was 36 before I got my first microwave, having been brought up by my mother to believe that they were only slightly less alarming than nuclear bombs. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say it is a hugely underrated piece of kitchen equipment. Chef David Chang – founder of Momofuku in the US – calls the microwave “the single best piece of equipment in a kitchen” in his book Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave). The microwave can be a brilliantly useful device once you learn what it is good at. I suspect the negative image of microwaves comes down to two things: we fear them, and we don’t know what to cook in themĪ 2020 survey of 600 consumers across Europe found that almost all of them used the microwave just for thawing and reheating frozen food. But somehow, these pro-microwave messages seem to get drowned out by the anti-microwavers. On 30-Minute Meals, Jamie Oliver launched a valiant defence of microwaves as a way to make “wholesome lovely things” such as quick sweet potatoes or steamed fish. On one episode, he asked a team of chefs whether he had been served anything which wasn’t microwaved, only to explode with rage when they replied “the salad”. On his TV show Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay never missed an opportunity to humiliate chefs who put food in the microwave, and complained on at least one occasion that it made food taste “rancid”. The microwave’s image has not exactly been helped by celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, who said last year that the microwave “sends your fucking brain haywire” (a statement which has absolutely no bearing on reality). I recently served vegetable soup cooked in a microwave to two keen twentysomething cooks (easy: microwave 400g prepared vegetables covered on high for four minutes, add stock, seasoning and a bit of butter or oil, cover again and microwave for another four minutes before blitzing and adjusting seasoning) and they both said they had never heard of such a thing, let alone tasted it. Most people laughed when I asked whether they actually cooked using one, as opposed to just heating up leftovers, defrosting frozen dinners or warming milk or coffee. Yet I know almost no one who turns to the microwave as their preferred mode of cooking. It gives them the willies because of the mysterious waves jumping around inside.” In an interview with the Guardian in 2013, Pollan commented that, “nobody wants to get too close to a microwave. The American food writer Michael Pollan spoke for many when he protested – in his book Cooked – that “the microwave oven is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal”. We jest of “nuking” or “zapping” food, or we talk disparagingly of “microwave dinners”, as if the technology’s only real use were heating up ready meals. Yet when the microwave is spoken of, it is usually in negative terms. In 2018, 93% of UK households owned a microwave oven, up from 67% in 1994. It’s hard to think of another household object owned by so many and praised by so few. The joke works only because the microwave is generally so undervalued as a kitchen item. By the following year, the clip of Nigella saying “mee-crow-waa-vay” had become so popular it was nominated for a Bafta. It was a joke, clearly, but some people didn’t understand this and Nigella was forced to explain that she did actually know how microwave was normally pronounced. The food writer was heating milk for mashed potatoes on her TV series Cook, Eat, Repeat when she commented that she liked to heat the milk in a mee-crow-waa-vay, as if it were some kind of obscure yet deeply sophisticated European food gadget. I n 2020, Nigella Lawson almost broke the internet just by saying the word “microwave”.
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