The most interesting story of gas to electric was our next door neighbor. When they moved in about 1959, they brought a 36" Dixie to go in the place of the previous neighbor's 40" mid 50s Hotpoint. When I was trying to get an electric range in our house, she told me she would be mad as hell if someone put an electric range in her kitchen. They moved after we did and I visited their new home to find a builder-installed Frigidaire Compact 30 in the kitchen. She was not home and I said nothing. Years later, I visited them in a home they had built to find a nice WP kitchen with the electric cooktop and wide non-self cleaning wall oven. We talked about the dishwasher and oven, which she loved for the width which she had been introduced to with the Frigidaire, but we never mentioned the electric cooktop. I was a guest and did not want to be rude, besides there were too many other things to talk about. I had my first taste of pepper jelly there and got hooked. She went from gas to Radiantube units, which do not have the fast response of gas, but which are not hard to cook on once you get used to them and she stayed with electric cooking in the new place. It would have been a wonderful story to hear. In both places, she had a large garden, the kind you hire someone to plow in the spring, and did lots of canning, so the stoves got a lot of use. One thing I do remember from the days with the Dixie was that she bought a new Rubbermaid stovetop mat that fit the space between the burners. It had the crinkley metal top and yellow rubber borders. Well, a week later and I saw that the rubber was getting scorched along the edges and soon thereafter, the sides had been hacked and sawed away with what must have been a dull knife to keep it safe from the flames.
As for high power burners for stir-fry cooking, unless the range or cooktop has a special wok burner, regular burners throw the heat outward instead of toward the wok's base. A good flat bottom wok over a high wattage electrical element provides much more intense heat in bottom of the pan. I do remember seeing an article some decades ago about a retired Chinese couple who had owned a restaurant for years and when they remodeled their kitchen, they had a special wok burner put in so that the chef/father could still prepare his famous dishes for gatherings. It had its own hood, and three different burner rings with the output of a small furnace, but what was most remarkable was that the burner was surrounded by a stainless steel water tank that had to be filled before cooking to insulate the surrounding areas from the heat. This was in San Francisco and the article explained that it was the only way such a powerful burner would be permitted to be installed in a residential kitchen. I would imagine that today a powerful wok induction unit would work just as well with a lot less wasted heat.
