 "electric pressure cooker")
When the cookbook author and food editor Chandra Ram was a child visiting relatives in India, the sounds coming from the kitchen would make her jump.
There she’d be in the sitting room, snuggled up with a Hanuman comic book, “and it would come out of nowhere, this high-pitched shriek,” she said — a periodic wail like an oncoming train crossed with a gym teacher’s whistle and a mating cat.
This was the sound of the traditional stovetop pressure cooker, a fixture in Indian kitchens for decades.
The electric pressure cooker that Ms. Ram was using on a recent evening to sauté onions
