Hawkins Classic Pressure Cooker

The Hawkins Classic is a pressure cooker: a deep pot of polished aluminium with a long black handle, in which rice, lentils and meat cook in a fraction of the usual time under steam pressure. Its lid is oval and fits inside the rim, so that the steam presses it outward against the opening and it cannot be lifted while the cooker is under pressure. A metal bar over the lid joins two handles that clamp together. A weighted regulator on top releases steam with the whistle familiar to Indian kitchens.

The cooker came to India in 1959. H. D. Vasudeva, who had lost his business at partition and begun again at fifty-four, founded Pressure Cookers and Appliances in Bombay that year, in technical collaboration with L. G. Hawkins & Co., a London maker of household appliances. The English firm had advertised its own Hawkins Universal since at least 1950, and the Indian company made it under licence, advertising its safety: the lid that locks under pressure, the safety valve that directs steam downward.

Indian cooking needs a great deal of slow simmering, and the pressure cooker suited it as it suited few cuisines in the West. Hawkins and its rival Prestige, launched the same year, made the cooker a fixture of Indian households by the 1980s, sold with recipe books and a five-year guarantee. The English Hawkins business, meanwhile, passed through Pye and Philips and closed in the late 1990s; in 1986 the Bombay company had bought the trademark and taken the name Hawkins Cookers.

The company calls the Classic its inaugural range and its best seller. It has added a better pressure regulator, induction bases and sizes from 1.5 to 12 litres, but the pot, the inside-fitting lid and the bar across it are those of the cookers in its early advertisements. It is made at factories in Thane, Hoshiarpur and Jaunpur.