On pressure cookers.

[vvalkyri]

[crossposted from a comment on FB, then expanded]Interesting thing on the radio last night - they were taking about pressure cooker bombs, and that, to one person, implied not-local, as pressure cookers aren't much used in the US. Admittedly most of my memories of them involve artichokes, but I'd always thought pressure cookers were standard

Comments

[nancylebov]

I think pressure cookers are pretty common in the US, but hardly universal.

[quietann]

My parents had a pressure cooker, a long time ago. I don't know what happened to it; I think it was a wedding gift and they basically never used it.

I hear they are very popular among Indian immigrants for some reason.

When I was in high school, I had several friends who were into those DIY explosions. One got expelled for setting off a rocket during lunch. A boy I rode the bus with... well, he had separated his ingredients (one was sugar) and tossed them in his backpack, and they somehow got mixed, causing a small explosion just as we pulled up to the school. His shoe got melted, and there was a small hole in the bus... ooops. For some reason he was not expelled, just sent home for the rest of the week. But you would not believe how the story spread -- back in the days before email, much less Facebook. There were all kinds of kids from other schools who heard about "that guy who blew up a school bus", and a few years later, when I briefly dated him, people still remembered it.

[musicman]

My family had a pressure cooker when I was growing up. My brother still uses one, they are very handy for certain types of cooking.

I also dabbled in the home made chemistry of things that went boom. Made model rockets with home made fuels of various types, some amusing, and some less so today. We made our own gunpowder, as well as stuff even more evil than that. I do not tell my son anything about this, never have and never will. It is a different world today. For instance - I used to walk through our town carrying a .22 rifle to go target shooting with my friend who lived across town. No one ever said anything, or thought it weird. It was small town Ohio life, and so different from today. Oh - and it was way back in last century, too. I graduate high school in 1968, to give some idea of how far back.

[khall]

We used to take fireworks apart and make serious bombs growing up. I am pretty sure that is illegal now.

K.

[leiacat]

I was going to mention that we use a pressure cooker (in fact, that's how the beef we served at Passover was made), but then I remembered that I'm foreign, and therefore, not a counterexample.