The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [186]
Solid facts are hard to come by in this brave new world. The Toynbee of the microwave has yet to set pen to paper, but it is generally agreed that in 1945 or 1946 a radar scientist at Raytheon labs in Massachusetts noticed that a Hershey bar had unaccountably melted in his pocket. If he had remembered that cocoa butter is liquid at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, we might all still be living in caves and cooking over peat fires. But our scientist guessed that radar waves had caused the mess in his pocket. He proceeded to pop some corn in a galvanized garbage can and then applied for a patent. There is no record of how the stain was removed.
Since then the garbage can has been reshaped into a metal box, and the FCC has assigned a frequency of 2,450 megahertz (million cycles a second) to microwave cooking, somewhere between marine radar and channel 69 on your UHF television dial. Dividing the speed of light by 2,450 million cycles per second yields a wavelength of about four and three-quarters inches, which is supposed to explain why microwaves penetrate your food by about an inch and a quarter, unlike infrared radiation in conventional cooking with a wavelength only one-fourth as long, which is pretty much absorbed at the surface, where it causes the delicious browning reaction, which microwaves don’t.
Microwaving Your Sneakers
Just because you have finally admitted that your microwave oven is useful only for popcorn and reheating leftovers, this is no reason to throw it away. Think up new uses for it. When I read recently that a large appliance manufacturer is developing a microwave clothes dryer and the next day tripped into a puddle in front of my house, I decided to experiment.
Dry Sneakers
1 wet athletic shoe, about 20 ounces, Nike or similar brand
1 full-size microwave oven
Place your shoe on the oven floor, sole up. Set the power level to about one-third for 5 minutes. Repeat, checking each time for hot spots on the shoe. Remove if you find any or when the shoe is almost dry. If you try to get it bone-dry, the rubber parts will bubble up and the instep will smoke and smolder.
December 1988
In both cases, the absorbed energy agitates the food molecules, which we call heat, and the heat is then transferred to the rest of the food by conduction. Infrared waves agitate almost all types of molecules. The books disagree about whether microwaves agitate only polar molecules, principally water, or whether their energy is imparted most effectively to salts and fats. The distinction is crucial to understanding what happens to your dinner in the microwave oven, but I can safely say that the Newton of the microwave has yet to publish his findings.
Sixty percent of American homes have microwave ovens, more than have dishwashers; half of these acquired their ovens since 1984. People in the western states buy them more often than people in the East. Everybody in the West refers to microwave ovens as “nukers” and to cooking food in them as “nuking” it. This metaphor is imprecise because microwave radiation is nonionizing, meaning that it leaves the electron rings in food atoms unaltered. Otherwise your food would emit radiation on your plate and in your stomach.
Step Two: The software. While my ovens were in transit, I assembled a representative pile of twenty current microwave cookbooks, all that I could find with substantial sections on fish. For the most part, these are not books to curl up with on a wintry evening. There are no literary excursions to that perfect little microwave shop near the market in Lyons. The recipes are short and telegraphic with apologies preceding those that require much explanation. The books are unanimous: “Once you have tried microwave-cooking fish, you may never cook it any other way.… The fish stays moist and cooks through