How delighted my mother, the cookery writer Marguerite Patten, would have been to read your article (Cheap heats: microwave cooking tips to save you time and money, 30 August). 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 the second world war and postwar years, but for decades afterwards in her 170-plus books.
She was delighted when microwaves came on to the market, and she became the lifetime president of the Microwave Association (I assume that lasted until her death aged 99 in 2015). She always swore that using a microwave was the best way to cook fish, and she 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 Two-Way Cookbook: For Microwave and Conventional Cookery (1985) with Jenny Webb.
She would also be urging the use of pressure cookers. Her book The Basic Basics Pressure Cooker Cookbook, from which you published recipes in July 2010, can be hunted down online.
Judith Patten
Richmond, London
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