Tatung

My family grew up using a Tatung rice cooker — a staple among Taiwanese households.

It has two settings, cook and warm, and an on/off switch. That’s it.

Over the years I experimented with other cookers — each boasting a multitude of settings and buttons, claiming to help you dial in the perfect meal. More complexity and more customization sounded great in theory, but in practice it proved to be more of a headache than a benefit.

After more than a decade I came full circle today and purchased a Tatung similar to the one I had growing up, ready to embrace it for what it always was: a remarkably effective and wonderfully simple-to-operate kitchen appliance.

The novelist Terry Pratchett wrote in his book A Hat Full of Sky, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

I needed to try other things, if only to realize that what I really needed was always in front of me.