More and more commercial chefs are using induction, both for the way it keeps the kitchen cool and for the speedy response.
I conducted a long campaign for an electric stove. It was sorta touched off by a contest Frigidaire had in magazines. There was a numbered ticket you could take to your Frigidaire dealer to see if you won anything, but you could also fill it out to win an appliance in a drawing. I asked mom, as I filled out the thing, what she would like from the list. She said, "The Stove."
I said, "You know it's electric," but she was not too bothered by that. So with my best friend having moved into a house with GE built-ins, I was off on my campaign. My sister was a baby that year and it took about two and a half years until February of 1964 to get the General Electric range.
No disrespect is intended and all of the characters in this annecdote are dead and gone, but this is about out next door neighbors. The wife told me about this time that she would be mad as hell if someone replaced her gas stove with an electric one. They moved away after we did and once when I came home from up here, I dropped by to visit them. In the kitchen was a Frigidaire Compact 30. I said nothing. A few years later, I visited them in a new house and the kitchen was all Whirlpool with the wide built-in electric oven, nice electric cooktop and the super scour dishwasher. As we ate dinner and I had my first taste of hot pepper jelly, she talked about how she fell in love with the wide oven in the Frigidaire and that was why she opted for the wider manual clean oven instead of the narrower self-cleaning wall oven. I knew the Frigidaire was in the first house they bought and thought that it must have been hard going from gas cooking to those Radiantubes, but she was another former gas user who, once exposed to electric cooking liked it enough to choose it when the new house was built. She and her mother had over an acre of garden and farmed and canned and froze all season in both houses, so those stoves got some use. The neighbor on the other side of her in our old neighborhood had gone from a gas stove to an electric when they moved so maybe her experience helped pave they way for this neighbor's transition.
