Hey Toploader, does your Presto regulator have the little pointer that slides horizontally up to the "COOK" position? A family friend had one like that. I still have my mom's post war Presto, carefully preserved and put away, that she only used for pot roast with potatoes & carrots, but I liked it for stuff like green beans and potatoes whether for potato salad or for smashing. Later once I was on my own I expanded the use of my cookers for all of that plus stuffed cabbage leaves and rolled stuffed flanken and other things. My cabinets, like John and Jeff's look like pressure cooker city. I used to do a lot of canning so I have the old 18 qt models of the Presto & Mirro as well as the old tall 8 qt Mirro which holds 4 quart jars. My current cookers are Kuhn Rikon and WMF brands in all different sizes and a beloved 22 year old KELOMAT.
In the late 40s and into the middle 50s, the shelter magazines had great information & recipes for pressure cookers. That's where I found the method of hard cooking eggs on a rack for 8 minutes at 5 lbs of pressure. In a December BH&G issue, they had a display of the major brands of pressure cookers of the time. That is where I saw the picture of the copper bottom 4 qt stainless steel Presto sometime in the mid 60s when I found some old issues my mom had hidden in a closet. I finally found one at a Montgomery County parking garage flea market sometime in the 80s. It had been a wedding present to the lady selling it. Another time, a lady sold me one of the Presto stamped aluminum cookers with the big round weight on top from the early 60s still in the box, another wedding present. In one of the old owner's manuals from the early 50s, I read how to make a fruit cake in the pressure cooker so I made a plug for the tube in my smaller Bundt pan and tied a couple of layers of foil on the top and pressure cooked a white fruit cake that only had the things I like in it. I did not have to take any of the precautions to prevent burning on the bottom of the cake by lining the bottom of the pan with 7 layers of grocery bag weight paper like in oven recipes. I have a couple of the deep well pressure cookers from late 40s through early 50s ranges. The one I have not yet found is the one made by Mirro for Frigidaire deep wells.
George, what a surprise find you here after all those years ago in the 80s, I think, when we talked on the phone about your new style Revere pressure cooker. I'm glad you resolved the over pressure plug issue. Revere had just settled into production of those new models when the UL standards changed and mandated a safety locking system so they threw in the towel. I'm glad I bought the 4 & 6 qt cookers. Aside from being very rare, they are beautiful pans. Mine are boxed up waiting for a museum someday.
