Girls, read at your leisure, quite interesting information, the history of slow cookers and our Parenki.
Slow cooker (also "slow cooker", "long cooker", "samovar", "cook") - thick-walled ceramic casserole installed in a case with programmable electric heating, designed for simmering dishes at a relatively low temperature. Like the Russian stove, heating is carried out not only from the bottom, but also from the sides of the pan.
According to L. Narga's description, the idea of a slow cooker comes from the pot for cooking beans, known since ancient times.
In New England, beans were left in the oven overnight from the 18th century; Cooking the beans slowly allowed them to absorb the flavor of additives (such as bacon or molasses), and the resulting dish has survived to this day as Boston Beans.
The exact circumstances of the first electric heating of the pot are unknown. In 1936, the Chicago inventor Irving Naxon patented one of the variants and tried to produce it under the name English. Naxon Beanery All-Purpose Cooker. The attempt was unsuccessful, but the English company.The Naxon Utilities Corporation was bought by Rivel, which in 1971 created the slow cooker that quickly became popular under the English brand. Crock-Pot. 1974 saw the introduction of a modern design, with a separate ceramic tank making it easier to clean the fixture.
In the 1980s in the USSR, the Parenka slow cooker was produced by the Sverdlovsk Machine-Building Plant named after MI Kalinin, the use manual was written by Pokhlebkin and is still used as a guide to slow cookers.
The famous culinary expert V.V. Pokhlebkin traces the origins of the slow cooker to a pot in a Russian stove.
People suffered from the unsettled life, from the stresses at work and from the inability to establish regular and inexpensive food on time, without resorting to rather ordinary and tasteless food service. Namely, these problems were solved not by speeding up the preparation of food or heating water for tea and coffee, as people with limited knowledge of life and metaphysical thinking believed, but by getting food at a given time, say, by the time of coming home from work, ready-made, without the need do something yourself for this, even if only as soon as possible. After all, a tired person, in principle, cannot and, as it was believed for centuries, should not cook food, because he will always make mistakes. From here, precisely from this life practice, the institution of hospitality arose, and not at all from the motives of a moral nature, kindness, and similar "rubbish".
Only a special servant could prepare a ready-made hot meal by the time a worker came from work in wealthy families, and in the poor, a family member freed from all other duties - a wife, sister, daughter, who would always be at home and were exclusively occupied with household chores. As we know, there were practically no such “liberated” family members left in Soviet society in the 1960s and 1980s, with the exception of old retirees, who themselves often needed help.
Thus, it was the problem of preparing food for workers by the time they came home from work that was the main problem of everyday life in Soviet society. Life was falling apart in sync with the collapse of the family and its age-old functions to create and preserve the family hearth.
Massive “lunch breaks” in institutions became palliatives that “rectified” this situation, when employees, breaking into small groups, prepared food for themselves on electric stoves or heated the food brought and boiled water for tea and coffee.
The same task - to use state time for personal culinary purposes - began to serve various "feasts" in the service, both in the office and, most often, in unofficial, evening hours, in connection with anniversaries or birthdays of employees and for other "random »Reasons.
Despite the strictest prohibitions on the use of office premises for drunkenness and other "culinary" events, these prescriptions coming from above, after a month or two of their formal execution, were then unanimously violated by everyone, and everything returned "to square one" with the only difference that external decency , The "secret" of these official "feasts" was observed less and less, and "feasts" were held in the 90s not only openly, but also with a touch of a certain impudence, emphatically demonstrative.
It must be said that the "service feasts" dealt a severe blow to the still existing elementary concepts of the home table, to the reasonable and professional canons and rules of cooking. They finally weaned people off of correct, healthy and good-quality food, from the ability and desire to eat right.
The fact is that the food assortment of such feasts has always been based on ready-made store-bought material, that is, on semi-finished food: canned food, sausages, marinades, and in the confectionery part - on the most common and bad products of public catering bakeries - buns, shortbread cookies, biscuit rolls, that is, on all types of dough containing a high percentage of eggs and sugar and cooked not with yeast, but with soda or ammonia.
As for the actual culinary preparation, they were limited to "salads" in their most vulgar Soviet version, that is, using canned peas and mayonnaise, which for some reason, contrary to all the rules of taste and good taste, were combined with fresh cabbage, beets (boiled, and sometimes raw, grated), which is an unthinkable challenge to all the canons of national cuisines of the peoples of the world, as well as a demonstrative denial of the concepts of food compatibility and taste harmony accepted in civilized society. But the Soviet person turned out to be accustomed, or rather tamed, to these downright unnatural taste combinations, which, apparently, were masked and even "bathed" due to the abundant use of alcoholic beverages, also without observing any rules of their harmony with dishes.
Thus, the problem of correcting the shortcomings and distortions of Soviet life in general and household food in particular was incredibly complicated by the interweaving of those "savages" to which the bourgeois masses of Soviet society adapted, when they themselves, voluntarily, chose the easy way of "overcoming" the difficulties of life, orienting themselves on the "cold table", that is, a canned sandwich that does not require any culinary skills or labor input, but in this "cold table" they preferred its most disgusting, most vulgar and unhealthy variety - an arbitrary mixture of everything that "got it", washed down the same random mixture of alcoholic and artificial drinks: vodka, fortified wine, beer, fanta, coca-cola, pepsi-cola and other brightly colored liquids and artificial essences. Teaching such people to eat properly was not an easy and thankless task, for which, in truth, there was nothing to tackle. For the result could only be zero.
Nevertheless, the best representatives of engineering and the working class in the mid-1980s set themselves such a task, correctly defining its strategic and tactical line. It was necessary to start not with enlightenment and persuasion of the bourgeois heads clouded by ignorance and alcohol, but with the creation of a fundamentally new type of hearth, which would help to organize life in a new way.
At the largest in the USSR Machine-building plant named after MI Kalinin in Sverdlovsk, engineers, designers in friendly contact with me, acting as a culinary expert and consultant in the development of a new type of hearth, decided to create a quiet cooker - a hearth, from the very name of which the principles of its operation were already clear - the antipode of a harmful pressure cooker ... The quiet cooker was supposed to cook slowly, but ... so that the dish came out on time, that is, at a very specific, predetermined time. So, even an absolutely lonely person could in the morning, say, at 9-10 o'clock, turn on the slow cooker with soup and set it ready for 15:00. Arriving home 5-10 minutes before this time, a person found dinner ready, all that remained was to pour it into plates.
If the person was late, then the dish did not burn or boil, the slow cooker was automatically turned off as soon as the cooking period passed. In the slow cooker, it was possible to cook not only soup, but also second courses from any kind of food raw materials. The cooking time could be extended for 8-10 hours. In other words, it was possible in the morning, in advance, to set a dinner for yourself at 20:00 and get it fresh, not overcooked, not overcooked, not overdried exactly by that time.
This really was a revolution in culinary production and in everyday life. Indeed, unlike other types of electric hearths, the quiet cooker was a great relief from a purely culinary point of view, since the cooking technology adopted in it was the most professionally correct from a culinary point of view, and was also culinary valuable, since the dishes in the new hearth turned out to be tasty, with complete preservation of the natural taste and aroma of the nested products.Finally, a huge advantage of the slow cooker was that it made it possible to cook dishes of any national cuisine, not only not limiting the cook's creativity, but also extremely expanding the possibilities for any culinary fantasies.
I can say frankly that it was only with the help of the slow cooker that I mastered and understood the depth of the culinary ideas of Chinese cuisine, the dishes of which I could not fully reproduce on a gas stove, let alone all others.
Meanwhile, the principles of operation of the slow cooker, like all genius creations, were extremely simple
