Like so many of the most banal tools of modern life—duct tape, tampons, canned soup, the Internet—the microwave oven was born from the industry of war. Its key element: magnetron tubes, tiny, complicated devices that (I am given to understand) generate super-energetic shortwave radio waves, which can be put to all sorts of exciting purposes, among them efficiently heating up water. Before the Second World War, magnetron tubes were clunky and expensive to build, but the Allied Forces’ strategic reliance on radar required them by the thousands. Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon—now a massive defense contractor, though at the time a relatively tiny one—developed a method to mass-produce them, and by the end of the war Raytheon was manufacturing nearly all of them. Almost as soon as the Allies declared victory, the company filed a U.S. patent application for a device that repurposed all those military magnetrons for cooking—an atomic-age version of beating one’s swords into plowshares.
Raytheon’s original model, the Radarange, introduced in 1947, was a mountain of a machine, water-cooled and metal-clad, weighing seven hundred and fifty pounds and standing a robust five feet eleven. Fifty years later, by the time my parents were relying on them to cook our family’s nightly boxes of Near East rice pilaf, they’d shrunk to their current compact form, which is suitable for perching atop kitchen carts or mounting to the wall above the stove. My family kept our cookbooks in a low cabinet in the kitchen, but the most used ones lived full time on the countertop: the 1964 edition of “Joy of Cooking,” its sage-green binding patched with tape, and “Microwave Gourmet,” Barbara Kafka’s 1987 blockbuster about the hidden culinary potential of the lowliest kitchen appliance. Kafka, a food editor at Vogue, confessed in the book’s introduction that even she was once “a microwave snob.” Among her sophisticated friends, she wrote, news of her latest project “would have had a better reception had I announced my intention of going down to Times Square at 3:00 PM to take my clothes off.”
Despite her book’s place of pride in our kitchen, I recall only one particular dish of Kafka’s entering our family’s regular rotation: the elegantly named globe artichokes à la grecque, a dazzlingly bright and savory treatment in which artichokes are steamed to a melting tenderness in chicken stock and dill. But, as a college student, harboring dreamy ambitions of making feasts for my roommates in our dinky common-room kitchen, I bought my own copy of “Microwave Gourmet” from a used bookstore in town. Its six hundred-plus recipes propose an epicurean feast: snails dijon, roast leg of New Zealand lamb, Chinese-style fish with leeks and ginger, pheasant with currant cream, a porcini-studded veal Bolognese, and a distressingly nonchalant presentation of braised calves’ brains with turnip sauce. Kafka mentions, in passing, that the microwave is essentially a machine that makes steam, and I recall being gobsmacked by this realization: a microwave is just a weird, electrical steam oven, a brute-force bain-marie. Microwaved scallop mousse lands like a joke, but doesn’t a tender scallop mousse, delicately steamed, sound just lovely?
I would like to say that this awakening kicked off a lifelong love affair with microwave cooking. In fact, I have spent my adult years using the device mostly to pop popcorn, zap leftovers, and thaw frozen bricks of ground beef, while my dog-eared copy of “The Microwave Gourmet” slumbers on the shelf. Despite all of Barbara Kafka’s sophisticated exhortations, I never quite reached escape velocity from the popular narrative of the microwave as a clever little convenience box, a machine that heats but does not cook. This is, of course, a dubious distinction: heating is cooking; the microwave does cook things. And yet, like so many people, I have been a reflexive fire supremacist, clinging to some culturally ingrained notion that electric cookery is less real than anything done with wood, charcoal, or natural gas lit aflame. (The microwave isn’t the only object of our collective disdain for electric appliances, though our sneering is inconsistent: a convection oven counts as a real piece of cooking equipment, for instance, while an air fryer is a mere device.)
It took the upheaval of the past year to bring me back to the old idea that my microwave might be a cabinet of wonders. Through the window of my iPhone screen, I watched friends and cooks and colleagues admit to their own microwave love. At Eater, the recipe writer Aaron Hutcherson wrote a piece titled “The Time Has Come to Embrace Your Microwave,” in which he describes reheating leftovers, of course, but also crisping bacon, poaching fish, and (as suggested by the chef Preeti Mistry) effortlessly crisping up pappadam. The chef David Chang, a longtime evangelist for the appliance, solidified his position as the high priest of the Church of Microwave with dozens of photos and videos, posted to Instagram, that display techniques both straightforward—reheating rice, par-cooking vegetables—and mind-expanding. In one revelatory post, he explained how he nuked some onions and garlic in olive oil, added crumbled sausage to the mix and microwaved again until the meat was cooked through, then tossed the result with greens and cooked pasta. “Doesn’t matter if the sausage doesn’t brown,” he explained in the comments. “It’s getting wet anyway.”
And so I found myself, at the height of the sweltering, mostly indoors summer, facing down a pair of snapper fillets. I couldn’t so much as bring myself to light a burner on the stove for a quick sauté; I swear the microwave winked at me from its mount above the stove. Three minutes at full power (patted dry, topped with strips of julienned ginger, set in a glass dish tightly covered with plastic wrap) and those snowy wings of fish were gorgeously cooked, silken and tender, ready to be drizzled with soy sauce and sesame oil and zapped for another minute, with scallions to finish. It was so fast, and so flawless, that it almost felt wrong. Humans have a psychological need to tie together visible effort to value: when things happen too quickly, too easily, they come across as unbelievable, or untrustworthy. (User-experience designers, capitalizing on this quirk of psychology, are known to build soothing, reliable, and entirely unnecessary loading screens and faux progress bars into Web sites and apps.) Kafka, in the introduction to “Microwave Gourmet,” anticipates this chronological dissonance: “The only real problem you may discover is that cooking in a microwave oven upsets your time sense, in the same way that a food processor or a computer does.” Though, she added, “You get used to the speed—in fact addicted to it.”
Do you know, by the way, about your microwave’s “Set Power” button? It turns out that running the machine at full blast every time is sort of like cranking the oven to five hundred and fifty degrees no matter what you’re baking. I’ve found that modifying the power is one of the keys to properly reheating leftovers: that uneven checkerboard of scalding hot and icy-cold patches is usually the result of ingredients of different densities and water composition warming up at different rates, and rushing the job exacerbates the discrepancy. The microwave may be a three-quarter-century-old military technology rejiggered for push-button home convenience, but she thrives on subtlety, all the more so if you’re using it to cook: heartier vegetables, for instance, are their best selves when given more time at lower power. You can make a perfect poached egg in a microwave if you let the machine work gently: I crack an egg into a cup, top it with a few tablespoons of water and a splash of vinegar, and set it to seventy seconds at 60 per cent power. (Microwaves vary in intensity, and it helps to know what your machine’s wattage is so you can adjust the power accordingly. Mine, at max power, is a thousand watts.)
My recent microwave experiments have not all been triumphs—one particular recipe for chicken pâté sounded so promising on the page, but ended up resembling a loaf-sized dish sponge infused with onions. But the victories have far outweighed the disappointments. The whole time, built into my kitchen wall, there was this wonderful tool that I was wasting on peanut-noodle Lean Cuisines and frozen dumplings out of an unexamined sense of culinary shame. It’s great for those things, but it also makes a mean risotto, collapses fruits and berries into effortless compote, and—just as Barbara Kafka promised—steams a truly magnificent artichoke.
Microwaved Artichokes à la Grecque
Adapted from “Microwave Gourmet,” by Barbara Kafka
Serves 4 as an appetizer, or 2 as a main course
Ingredients
- 2 lemons
- 4 globe artichokes, ¾ to 1 lb. each, stems attached
- 2 medium white onions
- 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
- ½ cup good-quality olive oil
- Kosher salt, to taste
- Small bunch fresh dill
- Small bunch fresh mint
Directions
1. Juice the lemons, reserving the juiced lemon halves. Sprinkle a bit of the lemon juice in a large microwave-safe baking dish, and reserve the rest of the juice.
2. Prepare the artichokes: Using a sharp knife or kitchen shears, clip the thorny tips off each leaf, and trim the very bottom of the stem if it is brown or woody. Cut each artichoke in half through the stem, and use a paring knife to remove the fuzzy choke at the center of the artichoke. Cut each artichoke half in half again, making long quarter wedges. As each artichoke is cut, place the wedges cut-side down in the lemony baking dish, with the stem ends facing outward.
3. Prepare the onions: peel onions and quarter them vertically, leaving the stem end intact, and tuck them among the artichokes. Tuck juiced lemon halves among the artichokes and onions, and add stock, oil, salt to taste, and half of the dill, torn into sprigs. Cover tightly with plastic wrap or a microwave-safe, airtight lid. Set the dish in the microwave, disabling the turntable function if necessary, and cook at at 600 watts (on a 1000-watt microwave, this would be 60% power) for 12 minutes.
