It’s a kinda magic
For the past three weeks, I have been living a microwaveless existence. Housesitting over summer in Auckland’s CBD has been pleasant enough, bar the shimmering heat and early morning roadworks. But the apartment, which has a gas cooker, a whistling kettle, one of those mouthwateringly hip Smeg fridges, and a Soda Stream the colour of a December sky, lacks one modern appliance that usually makes my life worth living.
My love for the microwave is a long-standing source of mild scorn among those who know me well. It is a scorn born of ignorance because, if the masses knew what the microwave was truly capable of, they’d realise life without one is unfathomable.
I can often be found hovering about the microwave at home, awaiting the harmonious beep that signals all is right with the world.
One of my favourite kitchen practices is to microwave kumara. Stab it frenziedly all over with a sharp thing such as a knife and bung it in the ’wave for five to 10 minutes, and you have yourself a tuber that’s chewy and fragrant on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside: the perfect foundation from which to craft a lovely lunch.
Or chop it up, put the chunks in a vaguely microwave-proof bowl with a splash of water from the tap. Pop another bowl on top to form a precarious sphere. ’Wave for five minutes and throw the kumara into your vege curry or whatever.
I know you can buy vessels specially designed to optimise one’s microwaving experience, but I prefer to take a No 8 wire-type approach. The whole meal will be ready in 15 minutes including prep time, rather than hours in which everything else goes mushy and the kumara remains hard as rock.
My hovering usually prompts an inquiry from passers-by as to what I am cooking. It’s a question that elicits irrational panic in me (much like being asked to offer summer reading recommendations) because the art of microwaving as a bona fide cooking method is a lost one. Indeed, so thoroughly has it been consigned to the compost bin of history, that using the word as a verb or adjective prompts a squiggly red line to appear as I type.
‘‘I am microwaving a kumara/ potato/broccoli/bowl of porridge/ block of chocolate/cup of peas/ handful of nuts/whole entire pumpkin/damp underpants/mug of tea,’’ I respond, with as much nonchalance as I can muster. Inevitably, people have the gall to look bemused.
On one occasion, I liberated the cooked kumara from the microwave at my flat, in front of a shaggy-haired moron who was in the throes of converting a van into liveable quarters. Admittedly, microwaved kumara look somewhat alien – withered, pockmarked (from the sharp thing), emitting a faint hiss of steam. ‘‘What the f--k is that?’’ the moron asked, politely. When I replied, he warned I was in danger of suffering radiation poisoning.
The microwave was invented in that post-World War II period where humanity was fizzing with ingenuity. The magnetron tubes that had been used to generate microwaves for short-range military radar had been rendered obsolete for their original purpose, and their manufacturers were at pains to dream up a new use for them.
An engineer working for one of these manufacturers, Raytheon, was testing the tubes one day when he felt the peanut bar – whatever that was – begin to cook in his pocket. ‘‘He sent a boy out for a package of popcorn,’’ a 1958 issue of Reader’s Digest recounts of the event.
‘‘When he held it near a magnetron, popcorn exploded all over the lab. Next morning he brought in a kettle, cut a hole in the side and put an uncooked egg (in its shell) into the pot. Then he moved a magnetron against the hole and turned on the juice. A sceptical engineer peeked over the top of the pot just in time to catch a face-full of cooked egg.’’
About two decades later, microwaves became smaller, cheaper, and popular with housewives across the Western world.
Genius begets genius, and soon, in between downing new fandangled birth control pills and covertly reading Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, these culinary pioneers were devising new and thrilling uses for their microwave ovens.
In the 1980s, there was a proliferation of microwave cookery books, whose starkly lit photography manages to make recipes look, curiously enough, both undercooked and overcooked at the same time.
These books enabled home cooks to ‘‘open up a whole world of extra time’’ (National Microwave Cookbook, 1983) and ‘‘extend their culinary skills in ways they would have never thought possible (The Gourmet Microwave Cookbook, 1990).’’
Indeed, intrepid cooks been known to cook everything from lobsters to multi-tiered cakes. The Australian Women’s Weekly Microwave Cookbook of 1987 has an entire chapter entitled ‘‘Do-Ahead Dinner Party’’. Did you even realise you could use a microwave to make enough zucchini timbales, chicken stuffed with apricots, and chocolate cream cheesecake to feed a party of six? I’ll bet you didn’t.
Since microwave ovens exploded on to the home cookery scene sometime during the Nixon era, the appliance has suffered a backlash from microwave deniers: the shaggyhaired van dwellers of the world.
The ubiquity of microwave cookery though did cause some concern among people who erroneously believed microwaves irradiated foods, transforming them into carcinogenic time bombs. The appliance has been declared safe time and again from everyone from the World Health Organisation downwards.
Microwaving stuff in plastic is a bad idea, carcinogenically speaking, and mishandled substances can cause burns. But the microwave’s technology is not, inherently, dangerous.
Indeed, microwaving cups of tea actually extracts the leaves’ maximum amount of antioxidants – the compounds that disrupt the formation of cancer-causing free radicals. Research asserts microwaving a cuppa allows for maximum antioxidant and caffeine extraction from the leaves. I know, amazing. But I do it because heating up an almost full cup of water with a tea bag in it takes less time and seems silly to boil a whole jug just for lil’ old me. When it comes out, perfectly brewed, a splash of cold water makes it instantly drinkable.
The microwave had a brief reemergence in the sun circa 2014 when ‘‘microwave mug cakes’’ appeared on Facebook feeds and
My love for the microwave is a longstanding source of mild scorn among those who know me well.