Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:
To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.
But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. Two important pieces of context are missing. First – the book was published in 1985. Compare to the adoption S-curve of the microwave oven:
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Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.
So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?
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A lot of recipes in the book involve stacking various objects under, above, and around the food. For vegetables, Smith generally recommends slicing them thinly, putting them between a cardboard plate and towel paper, then microwaving the ensemble. This works great. I tried it with onion and carrots, and it does make nice crispy vegetables, similar to what you get when you steam the vegetables in a rice cooker (also a great technique). I’d still say the rice cooker gives better results, but for situations where you absolutely need your carrots done in under two minutes, the microwave method is hard to beat.
But cardboard contraptions, on their own, can only take us this far. They do little to overcome the true frontier for microwave-only cooking: the Maillard Reaction.Around 150°C, amino acids and sugars combine to form dark-colored tasty compounds, also known as browning. For a good browning, you must rapidly reach temperatures well above the boiling point of water. This is particularly difficult to do in a microwave – which is why people tend to use the microwave specifically for things that don’t require the Maillard reaction.
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In parallel, in 1953, chemists from Corning were trying to create photosensitive glass that could be etched using UV light, when they accidentally synthesized a new compound they called pyroceram. Pyroceram is almost unbreakable, extremely resistant to heat shocks, and remarkably non-sticky. Most importantly, the bottom can be coated with tin oxide, which enables it to absorb microwave radiation and become arbitrarily hot. This led to the development of the microwave browning skillet.
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The key trick is to put the empty skillet alone in the microwave and let it accumulate as much heat as you desire before adding the food. Then, supposedly, you can get any degree of searing you like by following the right sequence of bleeps and bloops.
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All in all, I think I believe most of the claims Smith makes about the microwave. Would it be possible to survive in a bunker with just a laptop, a microwave and a Cook’n’Pour SaucePan®? I think so. It probably saves energy, it definitely saves time washing the dishes, and getting a perfect browning is entirely within reach. There were failures, and many recipes would require a few rounds of practice before getting everything right, but the same is true for stove-top cooking.
On the other hand, there’s a reason the book is called Microwave Cooking for One and not Microwave Cooking for a Large, Loving Family. It’s not just because it is targeted at lonely losers. It’s because microwave cooking becomes exponentially more complicated as you increase the number of guests. [...]
From the article:
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