Sometime when I was a kid, the microwave oven made it’s first appearance in the kitchen of select consumer households, with the first versions costing somewhere around $1200 in 1970’s dollars, with the next versions coming in around $600-800.
Mind you, this was when a full shopping cart of groceries would only set you back around $40, so those were $600 big dollars… and it also meant that microwaves were still not in common use until the price reached $200-400 a few appliance generations later.
In those $600-800 days of the microwave, I lived outside of the country. We frequented an American bakery where we could get some of our missed delicacies, including the specialty of the house, their onion rye bread- which was the best, even better then our missed version from back home.
One day there, they had a fifty-cent special on hot dogs. I saw the person in front of us get one, and it was amazing. The bakery owner took a frozen hot dog, put it in their brand-new microwave, and in seconds the thing was steamy hot and juicy. This was the first time I had seen a microwave in use, and I had to have a dog of my own, to taste that delight that magically, only seconds before, had been frozen solid. A quick appeal to my parents, and the dog was ordered.
After less than a minute inside that humming stainless-steel box, the beep alerted all of us that the cooking of the delicacy inside was complete. A pair of tongs, a bun, and a large napkin to place it in all came together, and I was handed my little bundle of steaming goodness, my amazing, nuked hot dog, the first of many.
It was unbelievable, a novelty not appreciated now, after so many generations of cheap and ubiquitous microwave ovens, but yes, I will use this word for the third time because it certainly was… magical. And delicious.
PS- I’ve got a couple of Sabrett hot dogs lined up for lunch today. They’re not frozen, so I’m only 37 seconds away from lunch, and it’s still magical.
PS #2- Microwave ovens work using a penetrating radio frequency that causes water molecules to resonate- to energetically vibrate and quickly warm up. Most things we eat contain lots of water, as do humans, hence the safety interlocks that prevent us from operating the oven while open. That see-through metal mesh in your microwave window is as opaque as a solid sheet of metal to waves of that frequency. It takes a little bit of freshman Physics but you can calculate that stuff, to see what size holes you need in that mesh, to make this so.
PS #3- I’m hungry.