Over at MetaFilter, there was a great thread about microwaves (and particularly about the book Microwave Cooking for One and a very funny blog post about it, My journey to the microwave alternate timeline).
I immediately thought of the microwave we had when I was a kid - and then I saw this comment:
Right, I remember, it had the coolest name -- it was an Amana "Radar Range."
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:33 AM on February 21
My mom got us a microwave when I was pretty young - 7 or 8, I think? (I've tried looking up the models online, and none of them match my memory, although that Radarange logo looks just like I remember.)
She made interesting things for us to put in there - she would batch cook and put things in the freezer for us, and I especially remember muffins made in paper cups that we could microwave and then peel off the paper cup before enjoying. (I have this memory of corn muffins - probably Jiffy mix - with a dollop of peanut butter in the middle.)
We didn't eat a ton of bacon, but I have vivid memories of cooking bacon in the microwave: a double layer of paper towel, a layer of bacon, and another double layer of paper towel. It came out pretty well.
We were the first family I knew to have a microwave, and we definitely had the warnings about not standing in front of it while it was cooking (dangerous!) and a general weird feeling that it was surely okay or Mom wouldn't have bought it, combined with "but what about radiation?"
These days, I mostly use the microwave for thawing vegetables, or heating frozen vegetables before adding a bit of butter (and salt and pepper, of course), but it brings me back to a time and place to remember that early microwave, between the stove on the left and the freezer-fridge on the right, and the enjoyable feeling of being able to make myself something to eat (hot dogs, or paper-cup muffins), even at a young age.
One of these days I'm going to try replicating those peanut butter corn muffins. Probably without the Jiffy mix, though.
The photo is from the wonderful Library of Congress photo archive:
Bledsoe, John T, photographer. Woman putting meat in a microwave oven / JTB. United States, 1983. [07/12/ 12 July] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2024630642/.