“Cowl, convey to a boil, then scale back warmth. Simmer for 20 minutes.” These instructions appear easy sufficient, and but I’ve tousled many, many pots of rice over time. My sympathies to anybody who’s ever needed to boil rice on a stovetop, prepare dinner it in a clay pot over a kerosene or charcoal burner, or put together it in a cast-iron cauldron. All hail the 1955 invention of the automated rice cooker!
How the automated rice cooker was invented
It isn’t typically that housewives get credit score within the annals of invention, however within the story of the automated rice cooker, a girl takes middle stage. That occurred solely after the primary makes an attempt at electrifying rice cooking, beginning within the Nineteen Twenties, turned out to be utter failures. Matsushita, Mitsubishi, and Sony all experimented with variations of putting electrical heating coils inside wood tubs or aluminum pots, however none of those cookers routinely switched off when the rice was carried out. The human prepare dinner—virtually at all times a spouse or daughter—nonetheless had to concentrate to keep away from burning the rice. These electrical rice cookers didn’t save any actual time or effort, they usually bought poorly.
However Shogo Yamada, the energetic improvement supervisor of the electrical equipment division for Toshiba, turned satisfied that his firm might do higher. In submit–World Conflict II Japan, he was demonstrating and promoting electrical washing machines everywhere in the nation. When he took a break from his gross sales pitch and really talked to ladies about their every day family labors, he found that cooking rice—not laundry—was their most difficult chore. Rice was a mainstay of the Japanese food regimen, and ladies needed to put together it as much as 3 times a day. It took hours of labor, beginning with getting up by 5:00 am to fire up a kamado, a conventional earthenware range fueled by charcoal or wooden on which the rice pot was heated. The lack to correctly thoughts the flame might earn a girl the label of “failed housewife.”
In 1951, Yamada turned the cheerleader of the rice cooker inside Toshiba, which was understandably skittish given the previous failures of different firms. To develop the product, he turned to Yoshitada Minami, the supervisor of a small household manufacturing facility that produced electrical water heaters for Toshiba. The water-heater enterprise wasn’t nice, and the manufacturing facility was getting ready to chapter.
Though Minami understood the essential technical ideas for an electrical rice cooker, he didn’t know or respect the finer particulars of making ready good rice. And so Minami turned to his spouse, Fumiko.
Fumiko, the mom of six youngsters, spent 5 years researching and testing to doc the perfect recipe. She continued to make rice 3 times a day, fastidiously measuring water-to-rice ratios, noting temperatures and timings, and prototyping rice-cooker designs. Standard knowledge was that the warmth supply wanted to be adjusted repeatedly to ensure fluffy rice, however Fumiko discovered that heating the water and rice to a boil after which cooking for precisely 20 minutes produced persistently good outcomes.
However how would an computerized rice cooker know when the 20 minutes was up? A suggestion got here from Toshiba engineers. A working mannequin based mostly on a double boiler (a pot inside a pot for oblique heating) used evaporation to mark time. Whereas the rice cooked within the inset pot, a bimetallic swap measured the temperature within the exterior pot. Boiling water would maintain at a continuing 100 °C, however as soon as it had evaporated, the temperature would soar. When the inner temperature of the double boiler surpassed 100 °C, the swap would bend and reduce the circuit. One cup of boiling water within the exterior pot took 20 minutes to evaporate. The identical fundamental precept remains to be utilized in trendy cookers.
The ER-4 cooked the rice for precisely 20 minutes after which turned itself off.
Toshiba Science Museum
Yamada wished to make sure that the rice cooker labored in all climates, so Fumiko examined varied prototypes in excessive circumstances: on her rooftop in chilly winters and scorching summers and close to steamy loos to imitate excessive humidity. When Fumiko turned sick from testing outdoors, her youngsters pitched in to assist. Not one of the aluminum and glass prototypes, it turned out, might preserve their inside temperature in chilly climate. The ultimate design drew inspiration from the Hokkaidō area, Japan’s northernmost prefecture. Yamada had seen insulated cooking pots there, so the Minami household tried masking the rice cooker with a triple-layered iron exterior. It labored.
How Toshiba bought its computerized rice cooker
Toshiba’s computerized rice cooker went on sale on 10 December 1955, however initially, gross sales had been sluggish. It didn’t assist that the rice cooker was priced at 3,200 yen, a few third of the common Japanese month-to-month wage. It took some salesmanship to persuade ladies they wanted the brand new equipment. This was Yamada’s time to shine. He demonstrated utilizing the rice cooker to organize takikomi gohan, a rice dish seasoned with dashi, soy sauce, and a number of meats and greens. When the dish was cooked in a conventional kamado, the soy sauce typically burned, making the moderately easy dish tough to grasp. Girls who noticed Yamada’s demo had been impressedwith the convenience provided by the rice cooker.
One other intelligent gross sales method was to get electrical energy firms to function Toshiba distributors. On the time, Japan was dealing with a nationwide energy surplus stemming from the widespread substitute of carbon-filament lightbulbs with extra environment friendly tungsten ones. The vitality financial savings had been so exceptional that operations at half of the nation’s energy vegetation needed to be curtailed. However with utilities distributing Toshiba rice cookers, elevated demand for electrical energy was baked in.
Inside a 12 months, Toshiba was promoting greater than 200,000 rice cookers a month. Lots of them got here from the Minamis’ manufacturing facility, which was rescued from near-bankruptcy within the course of.
How the automated rice cooker conquered the world
From there, the story turns into a world one with advanced localization points. Japanese sushi rice is just not the identical as Thai sticky rice which isn’t the identical as Persian tahdig, Indian basmati, Italian risotto, or Spanish paella. You see the place I’m going with this. Each tradition that has a novel rice dish virtually at all times makes use of its personal regional rice with its personal preparation preferences. And so nations wished their very own sort of computerized electrical rice cooker (though some rejected automation in favor of conventional cooking strategies).
Yoshiko Nakano, a professor on the College of Hong Kong, wrote a guide in 2009 in regards to the localized/globalized nature of rice cookers. The place There Are Asians, There Are Rice Cookers traces the popularization of the rice cooker from Japan to China after which the world by means of Hong Kong. One of many key variations between the Japanese and Chinese language rice cooker is that the latter has a glass lid, which Chinese language cooks demanded so they might see when so as to add sausage. Extra innovation and diversification adopted. Fashionable rice cookers have settings to provide Iranians crispy rice on the backside of the pot, one to let Thai prospects prepare dinner noodles, one for good rice porridge, and one for steel-cut oats.
Automated rice cookers shortly unfold all over the world. These rice cookers are on show in Lima, Peru.
Jeffrey Greenberg/Common Photos Group/Getty Photos
My pal Hyungsub Choi, in his 2022 article “Earlier than Localization: The Story of the Electrical Rice Cooker in South Korea,” pushes again a bit on Nakano’s argument that nations had been insistent on tailoring cookers to their tastes. From 1965, when the primary home rice cooker appeared in South Korea, to the early Nineties, Korean producers engaged in “acutely aware copying,” Choi argues. That’s, they didn’t trouble with both innovation or adaptation. In consequence, most Koreans needed to put up with inferior home fashions. Even after the Korean authorities made it a nationwide objective to construct a greater rice cooker, producers didn’t ship one, maybe as a result of not one of the engineers concerned knew methods to prepare dinner rice. It’s a great reminder that the historical past of know-how is just not at all times the story of innovation and progress.
Ultimately, the Asian diaspora introduced the rice cooker to all components of the globe, together with South Carolina, the place I now reside and which coincidentally has an extended historical past of rice cultivation. I purchased my first rice cooker on a whim, however not for its rice-cooking potential. I used to be intrigued by the yogurt-making perform. Much like rice, yogurt requires a continuing temperature over a selected size of time. Though profitable, my yogurt experiment was fleeting—store-bought was simply too handy. However the rice cooking blew my thoughts. Excellent rice. Each. Single. Time. I’m by no means going again to overflowing pots of starchy water.
A part of a persevering with sequence historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.
An abridged model of this text seems within the November 2024 print challenge as “The Automated Rice Cooker’s Unlikely Inventor.”
