The Pressure Cooker Bible from the Pressure Cooker Queen… Wonderful!!!' - Si King, The Hairy Bikers By cooking food at temperatures that are far higher than conventional ovens, pressure cookers drastically reduce cooking times enabling us to cook in a cheaper, healthier and greener way. 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. 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

It gets better: pulses are also a rich source of resistant starch, fermentable fibre that is great for a healthy gut, and which may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. That resistant starch may be good for our brains too, with recent research suggesting that by boosting our intestinal microbiota, it can improve cognition through the brain-gut axis, and even our moods. 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. 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myself reliant on the accompanying recipe booklet, an old Marguerite Patten from the 1970s which is unsurprisingly very out of date, and an American title by Laura Sass, Pressure Perfect, which is great if you can be faffed with all the cup measurements and is unsurprisingly good on beans.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. For the filling. If your lamb is fatty and you’d like to remove some of it, fry it in a pan until browned and a lot of fat has rendered out. Drain off the fat and set the mince aside.

Try this recipe from the book

Heat a ladle full of vodka over a flame or in a small saucepan. Pour it over the pudding. Turn down the lights. Sit and watch it burn.

This humdrum tool of grandmother's thrifty cooking is resurrected with an amazing amount of glamour' - The Times 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.

Ingredients

It seems mould can happen above all when using greaseproof paper and foil or materials that are not very clean, also when the pudding hasn't been stored when totally cool and dry. There are lidded pudding basins that are metallic and plastic pudding basins, I don't really trust the latter as the lids have been known to warp under pressure. Wash out the pressure cooker and add water. Put the potatoes in the steamer basket and steam at high pressure: potatoes up to 100g will take around 10 minutes; large potatoes will take up to 25 minutes. Release the pressure, then peel the potatoes when cool enough to handle. Mash or preferably rice the potatoes. The high alcohol content means that, as long as the pudding is stored properly, it can keep for a long time.