How delighted my mother cookery writer Marguerite Patten CBE would have been to read the article in today’s (30 August) Guardian ‘Cheap heats: microwave cooking tips to save you time and money’. Eating cheaply and well were both important to her and her long history as a home economist confirmed this not just during the rationing period of WW2 and post-war years but for decades afterwards in her 170+ books. 

She was delighted when microwaves came onto the market and became the Lifetime President of the Microwave Association (I assume that lasted until her death aged 99 and 7 months in 2015). She always swore that using a microwave was the best way to cook fish, and had two microwaves in her kitchen that were in almost constant use as she tested recipes (and cooked for herself). She wrote at least two books on microwave cookery ‘(Microwave Cooking for One’ (1987) and (with Jenny Webb) ‘Two-Way Cookbook: For microwave and conventional cookery’ (1985)) both listed by Amazon.

And the Microwave Association’s online archive at https://www.microwaveassociation.org.uk/ reveals an article ‘Green kitchen: new wave cooking – The eco credentials of microwave recipes’ dated 11 October 2008 by Richard Ehrlich that had appeared in The Times in which he writes: 

• “Marguerite Patten, Britain’s senior cookery writer and a long-time microwave advocate, has published a microwave Christmas pudding recipe that calls for ten minutes of cooking. According to an analysis for Defra, cooking Christmas pud on an electric hob uses somewhere between 7.5 and 10 times more electricity than cooking it in a microwave.

“What does that mean for the nation? Look at it this way: for every 10,000 Christmas puddings cooked from scratch in the microwave, we eliminate around 26,000 kWh of electricity use – enough to run 250 full-size dishwashers twice a week for a year. We also save tens of thousands of litres of water. And these savings increase if the pud is then heated for serving in the microwave. Similar savings can be made cooking rather more everyday dishes such as baked potatoes in the microwave.”

I can hear her urging me, and all your readers, to get creative with their microwave cookerss, not leave them just for warming things up, but helping them prepare really cost-effective creative meals. 

She would also be urging the use of pressure cookers – her book ‘The Basic Basics Pressure Cooker Cookbook’ published by Grub Street from which you used recipes in July 2010  see https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/07/pressure-cooker-recipes-marguerite-patten can be hunted down on Amazon and other sites as a Google search has revealed this evening.

Yours faithfully

Judith Patten MBE