That's a Washington Post headline for
a piece written by Max Ehrenfreund — "a blogger on the Financial desk [who] writes for Know More and Wonkblog." Didn't you assume they'd have a
woman writing such a thing? This promise-of-the-Crock-Pot stuff is under the heading "Wonkblog," which I think of as Ezra Klein, but Ezra Klein relocated to that place that I've forgotten the name of... oh, yes,
Vox. I wonder what's...
cooking at Vox?
I have no idea who ever took the Crock-Pot seriously as a "symbol of women’s equality," and the idea that it made a promise — like a political candidate — is truly silly, though I feel as though I've seen political cartoons depicting a candidate for office as an inanimate object, a toaster perhaps. In
Bill Bryson's wonderful memoir about growing up in the 1950s, he talks about the simple, post-war enthusiasm for household appliances that took on a certain anthropomorphism:
Suddenly [Americans] were able to have things they had never dreamed of having, and they couldn’t believe their luck. There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron. If you bought a major appliance, you invited the neighbors around to have a look at it. When I was about four my parents bought an Amana Stor-Mor refrigerator and for at least six months it was like an honored guest in our kitchen. I’m sure they’d have drawn it up to the table at dinner if it hadn’t been so heavy.
But what did the refrigerator say? Did it make any promises, like the upstart appliance from the 1970s, which aped the spirit of the time and boasted of its activism in the Women's Liberation Movement?
The Wonkblog piece is kind of all over the place, not focused on the "unfulfilled promise" and "unlikely symbol[ism]" in the silly headline. There's quite a bit about how much
men like to use slow-cookers. But the most interesting thing about the Crock-Pot is its origin in
Judaism:
Nachumsohn, who went by the surname "Naxon," invented the slow cooker to be able to cook cholent, a traditional stew eaten by Jews in eastern Europe on the Sabbath. Since they were forbidden from cooking, the Jews would bring pots of stew to a nearby bakery the day before. They would cook slowly in the residual heat from the ovens, his daughter Lenore told NPR last year.
So a Crock-Pot was immensely useful for people with a religious need not to work during the part of the day when they wanted a nice, hot meal. With no such need myself, I never believed fussing with an appliance and dinner foods was a good use of time in the morning. You can cook quick dinners in the evening right before you want to eat — all that pasta and stir frying. Come on. That was easier than paying attention to what you were going to eat long before you were going to eat it. I like stew and pot roast too, but that was always easy to make the night before and then reheat.
I never bought a slow cooker in my life. I always thought of it as another junky appliance to clutter up the counter. The 1970s were the heyday of countertop appliances — a device that did nothing but heat hot dogs, the ludicrous "Salad Shooter," the (cannibalistic?) "FryDaddy." Who believed these things would fulfill any promises of liberation?
Does The Washington Post think we women of the 1970s imagined that smoking a menthol cigarette would change the weather?
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