The flying car of a tiny dog
I got into cooking in 2003 when a 1st-generation Hong Konger taught me how to make Sichuan stirfries in my tiny college apartment. I bought three things: a wok, a knife, and a rice cooker. He told me the brand to buy; it cost a full paycheck; he insisted that it would be worth it. I used it at least 4 times a month for the next 19 years.
It’s sitting in my garage now, and there’s nothing wrong-wrong with it, other than 19 years of technological development with rice cookers such that you can now produce unignorably astonishing rice at the touch of a button.
For five years, every Asian person who came to my house would gasp, point, and say “my grandmother had that rice cooker!” Which I believe. It lasts a lifetime, and it produces good enough rice. But I also know that rice cookers in general still last a long time, and they produce way better rice now. I produce enough rice that I can invest in a really good rice cooker. The tools I cook with cost as much as a really good rice cooker. Why am I buying an All-Clad sauté pan and not a rice cooker?
The short answer, of course, is a rare fit of nostalgia, mixed with the bizarre pride that I use every Chinese millennial’s grandmother’s rice cooker. There was a bit of a signifier in the unignorably large cylinder, soft pink lily floral print on the side, contrasting with all of the sleek minimalism of the rest of my kitchen.
My old rice cooker had a power cord, a button, and a light. The light turned red when the rice was cooking, and yellow when the rice was done.
The new rice cooker looks like the flying car of a tiny dog. It is designed with aerodynamics in mind for some reason, as if you are supposed to coil the power cord underneath it and slingshot it on a mission into the center of the sun. All of the labeling is in Korean. The manual is in Korean. When you turn it on, it speaks to you in Korean. You press the large orange button, because presumably that’s the one that makes it cook rice, and then it proceeds to lecture you, on and off, for a half-hour, in Korean, presumably about what acts of molecular gastronomy it is doing to the rice. When the rice is done, “Fur Elise” plays, and a recording plays of a bird chirping.
The model number of this rice cooker is easy to figure out, since it is the only text in Latin script on the entire thing. I googled it, downloaded the PDF manual, and translated it to English. I can apparently use it to cook any grain you can conceive, including glutinous rice, sticky rice, long-grained rice, sushi rice, couscous, farro, quinoa, traditional Minnesotan wild rice (which isn’t rice), lentils, etc. Beans, maybe. I haven’t tried non-rice because I have an instant pot for beans, and a stove for literally everything else.
The rice cooker has a clock. Why not, right? It arrived in my home two days before Daylight Savings Time hit for, we all pray, the final time in human history. So I had to learn how to reset the clock twice in rapid succession.
I had some friends over the other day, and one of my closest humans instantly pointed at the spacecraft and asked, with a small hint of anger in her voice, “When did you get that?” Two days ago. “Is this the first time you’re using it?” No, I christened it the day it arrived. And she shot me look like this object is unnecessary, bring back the old rice cooker. I could have brought back the old rice cooker, but in another, more accurate sense, you can never go home again.