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And on and on. Many of these books are tall and thin, like skinny people with no time to read about food. Most were written by home economists with a minor in microwave, appearances on a local television show, or a consulting contract with a microwave manufacturer. Nowhere could I find a book called something like Cuisine Électromagnétique by Michel Guerard or Fredy Girardet. Next best is Barbara Kafka’s admirable Microwave Gourmet (Morrow), which tackles tricky classics like risotto, confit de canard, and country pâté and includes an exhaustive dictionary of ingredients, techniques, times, and yields, which alone is worth the price of the book. On a more quotidian level but no less comprehensive is Mastering Microwave Cookery by Cone and Snyder, with seventy-five introductory pages of guides, charts, and other sometimes useful information. The lower-end books teach you to create in your own kitchen sombrero party dip, casseroles of tuna and potato chips, fiesta burgers, and shrimp trees, “an attractive Christmas holiday centerpiece” in which peeled microwaved shrimp are pinned to a large green plastic cone. I could hardly wait for my ovens to arrive.

Step Three: The shakedown cruise. The minute the GE compact model was delivered I felt a powerful urge to toss everything into its cavity. The bratwurst split after thirty-seven seconds and burst after fifty-eight; a Dove bar was successfully brought to eating temperature in its own little carton; cold coffee reheated less repulsively than usual. In preparation, I had picked up some convenience foods, I think they’re called, made just for the microwave. I tried two competing brands of popcorn, which come in individual popping bags. The Orville Redenbacher Natural Flavor won hands down, tender and crisp if much too salty. A prewrapped stack of frozen buttermilk pancakes, which you immerse in your own choice of syrup and breakfast spread before microwaving, disintegrated on the fork, and the side of the box read like a chemistry set.

There were two pounds of leeks and some chicken broth in the refrigerator. What better way to conclude my shakedown cruise than hold a bake-off between my two favorite microwave cookbooks. Their recipes for braised leeks are nearly identical but for cooking times. Barbara Kafka’s forty-minute recipe produced a delicious platter of tender leeks swimming in too much liquid, which I drank as a soup after adding a little cream and reheating it in the microwave; the other leeks, ready in half the time, were tough and stringy. Compared with conventional cooking, Kafka had spared me only ten or fifteen minutes of unattended baking and one pot to clean.

This led me to the dirty little secret of microwaving: many dishes take longer in the microwave! The more food you put in, the longer it takes. The magnetron (the vacuum tube that produces microwaves) sends a fixed amount of energy into your oven’s cavity, where it bounces off the metal walls until absorbed by food. An entire baron of beef absorbs only a little more energy every second than a little morsel of veal and, consequently, cooks that much more slowly. One baked potato takes five minutes to microwave, two take twice as long, and a dozen almost an hour. In a conventional oven, which circulates hot, dry air around each potato, one takes as long to bake as twelve—about forty-five minutes. Microwaving a twelve-pound turkey requires four and a half hours of cooking and twelve ears of corn fourteen minutes, both considerably longer than with conventional cooking. That’s why most microwave recipes serve only one or two people—perfect for today’s subnuclear family—and warn you against simple-mindedly doubling or tripling the quantities for larger groups.

Step Four: New-wave fish in earnest. Picture the most delicious fish you have ever eaten. I can still taste the spicy, deep-fried fingers of speckled trout on a drive through Cajun country, the mountain of tiny grilled fish—without an English name—that