The lessons to learn from icmic and induction cookers

The Icmic cooker was probably invented in Calcutta by Indumadhav Mallik, a Bengali polymath. It is a large tiffin-carrier placed inside a larger, double-walled cylinder with a charcoal stove below and a pointed lid on top, making it look like a ramshackle rocket.

The outer cylinder is half filled with water and stove lit, so that steam rises to condense and be heated again.

The Icmic cooker has been called an early pressure cooker, but the steam never gets compressed, so it is more of a slow cooker.

It is usually started early in the day, with different foods in the tiffin compartments — rice, dal, meats — all slowly cooking for lunch. The food usually got mushy, and the key is to use recipes where this works.

In Parsi Kitchen, Anahita Dhondy writes that one such cooker is still used in her nani’s house in Allahabad: “In four hours, everything is cooked perfectly, and the dhansak is infused with a smoky aroma.”When I first wrote about Icmic cookers in 2012, I was flooded with responses from readers who remembered or still used them.

There was also a shop in Kolkata that made or repaired them. Since then, the shop seems to have closed, and when my friend Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar wanted an Icmic cooker, she had to really hunt to have one made. But now, when the LPG crisis broke out, Anumitra told me triumphantly that she was using the cooker to prepare staff meals in Bento Bento, her Bengaluru restaurant.

Anumitra is an evangelist for diversity, of all kinds, in the kitchen.

She cooks with many heirloom rice varieties, prioritises less-used fish and vegetables and insists that her staff learn how to cook with different fuel sources — wood, coal, LPG, rice cookers, induction, even cow-dung on a traditional choola.

Anumitra was as little perturbed by the LPG crunch as the villagers near Udaipur who are close to another friend, who reported that they were laughing at the panic in the cities.

These villagers used LPG mainly for chai, but made and used cow-dung cakes, not only to cook the grain mash given to the buffaloes, but also for the special taste they gave rotis or batis, the hearty wheat dumplings that are a cornerstone of Rajasthani food.

The big beneficiary today seems likely to be induction cooking. As it happens, the first attempts to use the heat-inducing power of magnetic fields for cooking also happened around the time the Icmic cooker was created.

British and German patents were filed in 1906 and 1909 respectively, but it was only in the 1950s that General Motors created a demonstration stove, though it was never launched commercially.

As we see now, fuel shocks can spur energy innovation, and the next step towards developing induction cookers took place during the oil crisis of the 1970s. But it was only in the early 2000s that they became easily available.

One hurdle may be psychological. The absence of a visible flame, or even a heat element is disconcerting. Cooks must adapt hand movements, since the utensil can’t be moved from the induction top. But these adjustments aren’t hard, and are made up for by its energy efficiency, precision cooking and safety of use. Induction cooking has long been used, for these reasons, by caterers or outlets in places, such as airports, where open flames are discouraged.

Large professional kitchens often place them on the ‘cold sides’ where pastry work is carried out, and a heating source that doesn’t affect ambient temperature is appreciated.

Induction cookers might now become common, but it would be a mistake to depend on them, just as we seem to have been pushed, for what looks like political purposes, to depend on LPG.

The lesson to be learned from this crisis is that we must maintain a diversity of cooking options. Perhaps Kolkata could take the lead by proudly resurrecting the Icmic cooker.