Watts Cooking: Three Books on Microwave

Until recently, my knowledge of microwave ovens had been of the armchair variety. I had listened to paeans as well as angry attacks, all based on the belief that conventional and microwave cookery belonged to completely different realms of life--pointless kitchen drudgery versus freedom, or honest endeavor versus ominous wizardry, depending on the point of view.

However, several weeks of trying out recipes from three current cookbooks with a borrowed microwave have confirmed my sympathy with a third group of cooks--a group that sees the instrument as an interesting but limited tool, neither a miracle nor a monster.

Its strengths are real. This is not some alien mockery of cooking; it produced what may have been the most wonderful salmon I have ever eaten, deep-flavored and full of the fragrance of cucumbers. Still, there were some surprises that did not fan my enthusiasm.

The most unwelcome discovery of this project was the degree to which it recalled Thoreau’s warning: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”--or in this case, new paraphernalia. To start, I had to go out and acquire several otherwise unneeded pieces of cookware. Even so, further requests for containers of different dimensions, critical to the recipe’s success, kept cropping up. At the same time, I had to buy amounts of disposable materials--paper towels, wax paper and (especially) plastic wrap--that I ordinarily wouldn’t go through in several months.

The book with the most solid reason for being is “Micro Ways” by Jean Anderson and Elaine Hanna (Doubleday: 1990), who also wrote a newspaper column of the same name. Like such earlier works as Marcia Cone and Thelma Snyder’s “Mastering Microwave Cooking,” it is designed as a general manual, a microwave equivalent of “Joy of Cooking.”

About 100 pages are taken up with describing the instrument and its care, the features of different ovens and accessories (there are no brand-name comparisons), suitable kitchenware and techniques of cooking and defrosting. The recipe section (about 450 pages) also has much in the way of basic principles, charts and timing guides for menu categories and ingredients, literally from soup to nuts (including some 30 vegetables).

This is a work assembled with intelligence and care, notwithstanding a sloppy, hard-to-use index. The strong point is that it brings together much firsthand practical observation. When the authors say that dessert souffles won’t take to microwaving as well as savory ones, you’re pretty sure they’ve been there.

I’m less enthusiastic about the selection of dishes. It represents an unfortunately necessary juggling act between the better possibilities of the microwave and what the households of the land are likely to demand from a cookbook. Thus Anderson and Hanna spend a good bit of time on hot snacks such as flavored popcorn, “roast” meat or poultry tinted with “a liquid gravy browner” and versions of muffins and cakes that will inescapably steam more than they bake. I would happily have swapped these for a good sampling of Mediterranean-style fish stews and fruit compotes.

Actual cooking directions are clear and careful. Everything I tried, from simple soup stocks on, yielded reasonable or very good results with no more than the unavoidable latitude one gets with microwave timings.

Basmati rice with spices, dried fruits and cashews was lovely, the rice at that perfect stage of being fully swelled but not overcooked. Indonesian snow peas and red pepper in peanut sauce, one of a large sampling of somewhat homogenized versions of southeastern Asian and Chinese dishes, was agreeable. Chicken breasts with a pleasant, slightly sweet-sour sauce with lemon, soy and ginger confirmed all reports of how nicely the microwave cooks this cut.

This is an eminently useful book for cooks who want to explore the microwave for many sorts of cooking. It is rosier about some uses of the machine than I would be, and those cooks who aim just to get dinner on the table in less than 20 seconds might just as well stick to the microwave manual or the package labels of frozen dinners. But for a broad spectrum of other readers, from home preservers to midnight snackers, Anderson and Hanna offer diligently researched and tested guidance.

Carl Jerome’s “The Good Health Microwave Cookbook” (Bantam: 1990), the only one of these books to link explicitly the aims of microwave cooking and extremely low-fat cooking, is unfortunately the most poorly realized. The table of contents sounds great: lots of hearty and light soups, grain dishes, poached seafood and vegetables. The lists of ingredients look nice at a glance too.

All’s well until you actually get ready to cook something. Not only do many recipes turn out to be for combination microwave-convection ovens, but the instructions are full of booby-traps.

Instead of the careful detail about the shape of cooking vessels and the arranging, stirring and occasional rotating of food given in the other books, Jerome often just has you pile things into a “very large” or “large” microwave-proof bowl. Not until the last page of the book do you learn that the very large bowl, the principal cooking vessel of these recipes, should hold “approximately six quarts.” The trouble is, the majority will find it difficult or impossible to buy a six-quart bowl that isn’t too tall or wide for even a fairly large microwave oven.

Apparently the author was foolish enough to develop recipes with an odd-sized bowl “that has always been in my kitchen.” Sure, people can improvise with a smaller one, but they’d better know about ingredients such as sugar that can boil over dangerously and cooking times that will be completely thrown off.

There’s more trouble to come, such as dozens of recipes that call for microwaving a very long time (45 minutes, 80 minutes or “about 99 minutes”) on high power with a double layer of plastic wrap sealing the bowl--a good way to boil the life out of many ingredients and produce a steam explosion.

Or the author’s “important new discovery” of how to telescope the processes of making soup stock and cooking the finished soup: You put in something like 1 1/2 pounds of lean stewing beef, three turkey drumsticks or one large chicken breast along with the other soup ingredients, then throw out the meat after microwaving.

The litany of results I got from trying out these recipes was equally depressing. Brown basmati rice was hard and chewy but split at the ends, sitting in unabsorbed liquid. Green beans with harissa consisted of raw-tasting, unevenly cooked beans in a sweet red pepper puree fighting with a lot of spices. Broccoli with a green salsa was horribly bitter from a too-large dose of celery seeds.

The “greatest bowl of oatmeal ever” drowned out the honest taste of steel-cut oats with the pudding-y, caramelized flavor of boiled-down skim milk. An over-seasoned meat loaf that my guests christened “bread loaf” and an acid eggplant-spinach ragout illustrated a pitfall of low-fat cookery that too many authors run right into: flavors that seem half-realized, harsh-edged or not fully blended despite a barrage of spices and seasonings. Drastically reduced-fat cooking requires more delicacy and subtlety in the handling than ordinary cooking, not less.

All things considered, I think the author was not wise to suggest in the preface that he has come to understand the fresh, natural flavors better than did his mentor, the late James Beard.

Lori Longbotham and Marie Simmons’ “Better by Microwave” (Dutton: 1990) is the only one of the three books that I could imagine cooking from simply for enjoyment, if I ever join the microwave majority. Horse sense, good instincts about seasonings and effects and a real effort to make things not just cook faster but give pleasure are conspicuous features of this book.

Tellingly, it is also the only one that just plain steers away from the kinds of things that cook badly or dubiously by microwave, such as roasts or cakes. It does not pretend to be an all-around microwave manual or a diet book, but along with a large range of recipes for a general audience, it does offer much useful “service” information and about 115 recipes (out of 270) low in fat and/or sodium.

First things first: The recipes are good. Given the vagaries of the wonder appliance, not all timings will pan out without individual adjustment, but flavors are consistently up to snuff.

The selection emphasizes many of the same things as “The Good Health Microwave Cookbook,” and also plays with trendy ingredients; otherwise, the two works are like night and day. Because Longbotham and Simmons use flavors with delicacy, their inventions are basically harmonious instead of weird. They do interesting things with potatoes, assorted vegetables, unusual pasta sauces, main-dish salads and fruit desserts. Nor is something like tamale pie or Wheatena beneath their notice.

The dishes I tried, both full- and low-fat, had the hallmarks of careful thinking. I had fine results with a meaty-flavored, no-meat-and-no-cream cream of mushroom soup thickened with potatoes; oranges in an interesting spiced bay-leaf syrup; an honorable if not exciting attempt at a saltless, low-fat version of baba ghannouj ; a suave chocolate pudding; poached salmon steaks brightly set off with lime juice and cilantro, and a pleasant potato-turnip salad.

If I have a cavil about this book, it’s a sense of assorted worthy elements not adding up to much of a central concept beyond “Can we get it to work in the microwave?”

With this able pair, the answer is always, “Yes, very nicely.” But I find a certain make-work quality at times: five recipes devoted to the joys of popcorn that call for yet another appliance, the microwave corn popper; salads that become microwave recipes simply because there is a step for microwaving green beans instead of the words, “cooked green beans,” in the ingredient list; a recipe telling you how to heat water in a mug with some sliced ginger and a Red Zinger tea bag. The writing too has a manufactured air.

Would “Better by Microwave” stand out much from a half-dozen other good recent cookbooks if the recipes were not for the microwave? Frankly, no--but few microwave cookbooks honestly merit a second glance in the company of good mainstream works. This one does.