Mindblowingly, the pressure cooker was actually invented well before that, at the end of the 17th century! Add the chopped onion, garlic and ginger and continue to fry until everything has started to turn a light golden brown. She’s the author of two books on the subject and recently I watched her demonstrating the versatility of these pans at an evening hosted by friends in Norfolk. It is a method I highly recommend - you don’t have to switch the oven on and the pressure cooker is so good at intensifying both flavour and colour.

Use a sturdy trivet with handles or fold a pleat into foil or baking parchment and secure around the top of the basin - you can tie with string, making a handle at the same time, or just fix into place with an elastic band. Stir in a couple more tablespoons of alcohol for flavour - it will absorb quickly in the residue heat - and leave to cool. Used your method and timings with a few ingredient substitutions to make two lovely looking puddings. Author Catherine Phipps gently guides readers through everything they need to know about cooking in a stovetop or electric pressure cooker, with foolproof, step-by-step instructions. The Pressure Cooker Cookbook by first time author Catherine Phipps has genuinely changed the way I cook for the better.Shakshouka with Feta, All in One Macaroni Cheese, Crispy Aromatic Duck, Squid and Chorizo with Black Rice all the recipes included are delicious and will go down well with hungry friends and family. Nowadays pressure cookers are much more sophisticated – state of the art stainless steel pots, with three, sometimes four release valves. The recipe I’m sharing today is a pressure cooker version of a recipe from Catherine’s earlier Chicken book and reduces the cooking time down from an hour to 20 minutes all in.

So, instead of a chilled trifle, use the Christmas pudding, you have to work quickly so you’ve got your regular layers in but put the fried Christmas pudding layer in the middle of it. 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. You can leave your pressure cooker Christmas Pudding on Warm in your electric pressure cooker as long as you want really. Marmalade (even if I now have to wait till next January); and, of course, in memory of my late mother-in-law, Crème Caramels.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. The food that emerged could be quite samey in flavour although my Mum managed to cook many delicious soups and stews.

Electric pressure cookers, meanwhile, might suit those who “have lots of worktop space, are used to slow- or multi-cookers and like that way of cooking”; they also come with a multitude of accessories, such as air-fryer lids and yoghurt makers, if they’re up your alley.After all, whatever way you cook, repetition (which leads to relaxed familiarity) is the greatest teacher. You can use them as a bain marie and they will emulate the type of souped-up steam oven that they have in professional kitchens.