Book Review: Kirby & Allen Pressure Cooker Instruction Manual and Recipe Book

Title: Kirby & Allen Pressure Cooker Instruction Manual and Recipe Book

Author: Kirby & Allen

Publisher: Kirby & Allen

Date: not shown

ISBN: none

Length: 56 pages

Quote: “Pressure cooking can reduce normal cooking times by as much as half.”

The first twenty pages are about using that specific model of pressure cooker. More recently made pressure cookers are somewhat similar. The rest of the book consists of recipes. Many are dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, soy-free. Only a couple of recipes for sauces are vegan.

I’ve not tested any of these recipes as written. My mother had a pressure cooker; she used it for canning, and cooking beans. I’ve never owned or used one.

Though not dated, this little cookbook has a late 1980s or even 1990s look, with its recipes for elaborate soup stocks and its use of prosciutto and sun-dried tomatoes. It contains lists of cooking times for beans and other vegetables, but no vegetable recipes.

This is a short review, so I'll share a little of the family history...

While Mother's pressure cooker was not made by Kirby & Allen, nor were most of our vacuum cleaners Kirby brand, we had a relative who bought things with the name Kirby on them.

It's a British name, semi-aristocratic; there still is a crumbling ruin of a Kirby Castle in Leicestershire, which was the "shire" Mother's British ancestors claimed as home, though most of them don't seem to have actually lived there. The castle has also been called "Muxloe," probably because, being too close to the moat, it appears to be sinking into a mucky slough. The outer fortification shown, certainly.

Photo courtesy of https://medievalbritain.com/type/medieval-castles/kirby-castle/

But, inbred though the European aristocracy was, this relative had no record of any actual ancestral connection with the Kirby family. She was married to a man I grew up calling Uncle John Kerby, though he was not related to me and his father spelled his name Kerbovic. He was quiet and nice-looking, a veteran, a skilled worker who went to the same job every day for almost forty years after the War. He never quarrelled with anyone, partly because he was so modest people might have imagined he was shy, and partly because anyone looking for trouble very soon realized it would not be a good idea to pick a quarrel with him; he was not shy, exactly, just peaceable. He was the only man on that side of the family my father liked. 

This aunt who had married this honorary uncle always seemed to think she'd made a good choice; they stayed together for about sixty years. Their daughter was the glamorous Slavic-looking cousin who was routinely mistaken for the movie star. But the aunt gently urged her husband to change his name to Kerby so that people wouldn't tease the said daughter about being Polish.

What sort of name was "Kerbovic," anyway, we wondered. Old Mr. Kerbovic, long dead before I was born, had immigrated through Ellis Island and brought no records. From what his children had been told, there were very few Kerbovics and they seemed to have moved around a lot. Polish? Austrian? Czech, or maybe Slovakian? They didn't seem very positive. The story didn't sound very posh, but there was something aristocratic about Uncle John Kerby's quiet decency. He was the proof that a son of poor, pitiful immigrants through Ellis Island could behave like a gentleman.

All the same, Mrs. Kerby was just a tiny bit proud of her own English ancestors and preferred that people think her husband had some connection to the Kirby family rather than to Eastern Europe, even Austria. 

Years passed, during which nothing relevant to this story happened. Mr. and Mrs. Kerby enjoyed a long active "retirement" and died, less than a year apart, in their late eighties. Their daughter, by that time semi-retired and working part-time, had become interested in genealogy and took over the family records. (I wouldn't have minded keeping them, but thought, realistically, that old records would be more easily preserved in the dry Western air where she lives.) 

Turned out, she reported, that although there never were very many Kerbovics, or Krbovics, and they'd been scattered around Europe even before the Germans and Russians started fighting over their homeland, they were aristocrats too. They had a castle too, also renamed and allowed to fall down. (I googled, just now, and found nothing about any Kerbovics or Krbovics or Kerbowitzes in modern Europe--not in a language I can read, anyway--but I'll take her word. I don't know what else the place has been called.) If anything the Kerbovics might have been higher up the feudal hierarchy than the Kirbys.

It's interesting to find our ancestors' names in history books, but it does not make us better people. It was a delight, though, to learn after he was dead that Uncle John Kerby was every bit as much an aristocrat as the relatives who'd fretted about his un-British name.

It would have been altogether unlike him to have mentioned such a fact, if he'd known it, or to have his daughter mention it. If any of the English relatives had said anything, he would just have smiled faintly and let the moment pass.