The Pressure Cooker Cookbook: Over 150 Simple, Essential, Time-Saving Recipes

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Phipps's exceptional book shows that the pressure cooker has moved far beyond its spluttering, drab 1970s incarnation' - The Sunday Times If you are of a certain age, you probably have some scary memories of pressure cookers. They had monstrous reputations – ferocious, steam belching geysers, they hissed and rattled away ominously on the stove, threatening to explode if not carefully attended and able to administer nasty scalds if not treated with properly insulated kid gloves. So it's hardly surprising that they are viewed by many as something to be handled with extreme caution at best, dangerous and to be avoided at worst.

Why don’t we eat more pulses? Brits eat fewer than the global average, even if we do put away two million tins of baked beans a day. Confusion over the names doesn’t help: they are often called legumes although these are the plants, members of the family Fabaceae (aka Leguminosae). Their seeds, the actual pulses, grow in pods and include beans, peas, lentils and peanuts (confusingly not nuts at all). For culinary purposes, we divide them by shape: lentils are flattened or ‘lens’-shaped, peas are more or less spherical, beans more oval. 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. With a pressure cooker, there’s hardly any evaporation, hardly any steam being released into the kitchen and, with electric pressure cookers, no babysitting involved so you can just leave it to do its thing from beginning to end. When to pressure cook it You have to ensure the Christmas Pudding is dry before you put it away, then wrap in greaseproof and foil or a sterilised muslin…

WHAT OTHER GLAZES CAN I USE?

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. 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.

Or take it out of the pudding basing and wrap it, just make sure it has cooled down fully before you wrap it. And use very clean materials. Melt together sugar, butter and alcohol. You can add a bit of cream if you want a rich creamy one but Catherine loves the sugar and butter.There is of course a minor downside: as the playground chant goes, ‘Baked beans are good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you fart.’ The wind factor is caused by indigestible oligosaccharides, the same annoying components that make Jerusalem artichokes so potentially embarrassing, while also being exceptionally good for your microbiome. Josiah Meldrum of British pulse specialist Hodmedod’s suggests adding a strip of kelp seaweed to your cooking water, as it is said to reduce the oligosaccharides. You should eat beans with grains. Legumes, with the exception of soya beans, don’t contain all the amino acids to make a complete protein, but the shortfall can be made up with grains such as rice or corn. And you don’t need to eat them at the same meal: your body can combine the grain from breakfast with the bean salad at lunch. 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. Heat the olive oil in the pressure cooker. Add the bacon/pancetta and fry until crisp, then set aside. Toss the beef in the flour and mustard powder and season well with salt and pepper. Sear over a high heat in the pressure cooker pan until brown all over. Set aside.

After the natural pressure release, remove the pudding basin carefully (a long handled trivet or a foil sling will be handy for this part).

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Suet: Catherine doesn’t advise vegetarian suet as it has palm oil. You get a much softer crumb if you use butter. She thinks it could be done with coconut oil, one to test! Okay, get both medium and mini pudding basins! How to make a foil sling to lower and lift the pudding basin It is more effective than soaking large amounts of fruit in the tiny amounts of liquid most recipes call for. If you leave it on keep warm for a few hours, that temperature will of course drop down. Substitutions

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. Also step in my partner Vincenzo, who, before meeting me, had been devoted to his pressure cooker. I asked why he hadn’t bought one for us, or encouraged me to use one, to overcome my fear. He replied that he had, on various occasions, and that I was stubborn. That night, I soaked 500g borlotti beans. The next morning, we drove to his parents to borrow their pressure cooker (which I must note is an Italian model, and slightly different from those Phipps writes about, so with different timings, but the inspiration was all her). diameter (needs to be 2 centimetres smaller in diameter than your inner pot or the inside of your pressure cooker for the steam to circulate safely) If you haven't got Catherine Phipps' book, The Pressure Cooker Book, it really is worth buying. All recipes have familiar ingredients and measurements for UK Instant Pot users. You can leave your pressure cooker Christmas Pudding on Warm in your electric pressure cooker as long as you want really.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.” You will end up with a very sturdy length of foil which you can use to lower your pudding into the pressure cooker. 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.