A short-stemmed rice, and a lid heavy enough to change its taste

The presentation, dated December 2017 in the notes, starts from a familiar appliance and from a grain. In the 1970s, they write, the government developed a variety called Tongil rice to ease a food shortage. It came, they say, from crossing work by Professor Heo Mun-hoe of Seoul National University: a short plant, a large panicle, able to grow in a temperate climate. The trouble was the taste. The rice was rough and scratchy, and the first Korean pressure cooker — the Pungnyeon, in their telling — was made so that this rice would cook up glutinous instead.

Beside that story they set the older cauldron. A heavy lid, they explain, slows the change of temperature and holds the heat. If the lid is light, steam escapes easily; if it is heavy, less steam leaves, the pressure inside rises, and the boiling point of the water climbs, so the rice is cooked above 100 degrees and tastes better. The figures and the causal chain are left as the notes write them.

From a wartime electric pot to a toothed lock

The electric rice cooker, they write, was born in Japan during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937, and was first put on sale as a product in 1955 by a person the notes name Minami Yoshitada. It reached Korea in 1965 through Goldstar, which they also call the present-day LG, but it did not catch on widely, they say, because of a technical limit: the rice still tasted poor. In the mid-1990s Sungkwang Electronics — now Cuckoo Homesys, as the notes identify the company — brought out the first electric pressure rice cooker, using high pressure to improve the taste, and in 1999 alone sold more than 400,000 units. That year’s count stays in their window, not recast as a later official total.

The new machine, they explain, no longer relies on a heavy lid. Tooth-like ridges on the inner pot and on the lid mesh when the handle is turned, so air and steam cannot escape. The same work of raising the boiling point is done by a lock instead of by weight.

IH, a network cooker, and an imagined pot that reads a mood

Later slides, in this account, follow the electric cooker from a simple warming pot to an IH model and then to a network cooking rice cooker, and they mention ubiquitous computing and infrared temperature control. The talk ends on an imagined future: an artificial-intelligence rice cooker that reads a family’s feelings and cooks accordingly. Whether that last picture is a forecast or a flourish is left as the notes leave it. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a December 2017 student presentation on the rice cooker and Tongil rice, with the 1999 sales figure left as the notes record it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026