Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker

Much like the movies, the electric rice cooker is a purveyor of time. After its invention in Japan in the 1950s, the device quickly became a domestic fixture all over Asia and the world, thanks to the almost magical simplicity of its operation: just press a button, and let it cook. For home cooks, that temporal interstice between start and automatic stop is freighted with all manner of meaning and feeling—yearning and desire, frugality and flexibility, feminism and capitalism—and so, too, for some of cinema’s greatest auteurs, who have found in the rice cooker a poetics and pragmatism uniquely suited to the screen. Guest-programmed by Devika Girish, this series spotlights movies where this humble household appliance becomes the rightful star in dramas of the heart, the stomach, and the soul.