of glasses and whistles

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The pressure cooker is a marvelous invention, enabling the preparation of food that tastes as though it took a long time to cook, when it actually did not. This is why it's one of the secret weapons in Indian cuisine. (How else could one have time to make something starting with hard chickpeas or lentils?) With so many single parents and otherwise-busy people in the west, why aren't we all using them?

According to one of the books I have on the subject, the pressure cooker had a spike of popularity in the United States in the 1940s among the Rosie The Riveter demographic, but with the rise in popularity of frozen and dehydrated foods (think "TV Dinners and gelatin") their use declined.

That they had acquired a reputation for asploding helped, of course. While industrial frozen & dehydrated foods may not have the best taste, they also won't make a spectacular mess all over your ceiling if you leave them unattended. But, to be fair, modern pressure cookers won't do that either -- thanks to decades of refinement of the concept in Europe.

The old "jiggle-top" valves have been supplanted by a spring-valve mechanism. You can see an example in the picture above. The little knob on the top of the lid rises with the pressure: if you can see one red line, the internal pressure is 8 PSI above the ambient pressure. If you can see two red lines, it's at 15 PSI. My pressure cooker can maintain either of these pressure points more-or-less constantly, without much loss of water, and almost silently for extended periods of time -- provided that you turn the burner down on the stove once you've reached your target pressure. If you do leave it unattended, multiple levels of safety mechanisms will kick in, safely venting pressure in a downward direction.

So my new toy has a lot of geek appeal: no shock there. I'm enjoying cooking: now that's a new thing. I've even taken a fancy to the idea of learning to cook Indian food. On the advice of a new co-worker, I decided to start simple by getting some pre-mixed spice packets from a local Indian grocer. They even have pressure-cooker instructions right on the back, he said.

This is where the story takes a sinister turn.

I stepped into the little store on 17th & P and began a long, slow perusal of the items on the shelves. The first brand of spice-packets had instructions that said, at one point, "add 3 glasses of water".

Ok, exactly how much water is that? I asked the grocer; she didn't know. She said she never made that particular brand. Ok, maybe that brand had badly-translated instructions, so I picked up another brand and was relieved to see quantities of water given in cups.

But wait, what's this? "Let cook for 3 whistles." That's the most interesting unit of time I've ever heard. I was able to infer from the grocer's explanation that the pressure cookers in India don't use the newer spring-valve mechanisms, but instead rely on the old weighted valves which periodically let off steam as the pressure rises past some threshold.

But how often does it whistle? How many minutes between whistles? She didn't know.

That's ok, I thought. Surely between Wikipedia and Google there's a definitive conversion table to be had, or at least some good estimates.

How wrong I was. In retrospect, that conversation with the grocer was really my first encounter with a vast Indian conspiracy to keep the secret of whistles out of the hands of western civilization.

Don't believe me? Try to find something on the subject. You know what you'll get? Nothing from Wikipedia, that's what. And from the documents in Google's index? The runaround.

Sure, there are plenty of people asking the same question as I, but the answers range from buy a pressure cooker that whistles to pressure cookers in India whistle, you know. And this is in response to direct questions, mind you.

The audacity.

Ok, maybe I stumbled on one of the last frontiers of knowledge that the internet has not yet captured. That's an easy problem to solve. I have connections: brilliant, technically-minded friends from India that can fully understand the importance of a unit of measurement. I'll just ask them, and write the Wikipedia entry my own damned self.

And this, dear reader, is what has convinced me that there is a conspiracy. These friends, whom I love like siblings, whose knowledge I consider encyclopedic, and whose intellectual thirst would normally pounce on a mystery like this have all suddenly become mute -- or down-right evasive -- when asked about the mysterious "whistle".

Even the great Praveen "KP" Kallakuri, now working at Google, said he'd ask some people there. Did he? Not until I reminded him, at which point he casually tossed me this link and said it looks like it has the info that I'm looking for.

Yeah, right. Like I can't do a find-in-page for the word "whistle".

I'm on to you. I'm on to you all.

[Part 1|Part 2|Part 3| Part 4]