Pressure Cooking

A pressure cooker is a sealed vessel that cooks food using high-pressure steam together with water or another water-based liquid, and the technique is called pressure cooking; because the sealed vessel traps steam and raises internal pressure, water inside can boil at a higher temperature than the 100 degrees Celsius it would reach at normal atmospheric pressure, roughly 121 degrees Celsius at one bar of gauge pressure, which cuts cooking time to about a third of what conventional cooking would take. The French physicist Denis Papin built the first prototype, which he called the steam digester, in 1679 in an effort to shorten cooking times, and he presented the invention to the Royal Society of London in 1681.