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.
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1. Pressure cooker (Wikipedia)
- Wikipedia 'Pressure cooker' 2026-09-27: 'The prototype of the modern pressure cooker was the steam digester invented in the seventeenth century by the physicist Denis Papin.'
In Group: Cooking Vessels and Cooking Aids, Lead paragraph
A pressure cooker is a sealed vessel used for cooking food with the use of high pressure steam and water or a water-based liquid, in a process called pressure cooking.
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