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I’m not sure how you could read the article and miss the historical context. In postwar Japan, many women were not cooking with saucepans on gas or electric ran

I’m not sure how you could read the article and miss the historical context. In postwar Japan, many women were not cooking with saucepans on gas or electric ranges with high-quality, industrially processed rice: >For centuries, most Japanese cooks made rice with a kamado, a box-shaped range topped with a heavy iron pot. It was painfully tricky. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice. The engineer who made the first, widely successful design relied on his wife’s expertise in this traditional cooking method to perfect it.

mynameishere 6y ago
It was painfully tricky "Until now, this was the only way to get cooked rice from rice..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk&t=42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk&t=42s Okay, but in that case the best thing to invent would be a non-horrible stove. I've made rice, and even as an incompetent cook, it really is a non-issue.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Most Japanese houses postwar were not equipped to have good gas ranges. The article highlights that widespread electrification had occurred, which favored rice cookers, especially because cooking food on electric ranges is anathema for huge swathes of Japanese cuisine. The standard to be measured against was also, again, Kamado rice, which most rice cookers today would struggle to meet and I guarantee few bachelors are measuring up to with their sauce pans.