5 Best Multicooker Cookbooks: Urvashi Pitre, Madhur Jaffrey, America's Test Kitchen

They make comfort food—stew, chili, mac and cheese, beans, risotto—and transform tough cuts of meat into deep-flavored, silky-textured marvels.

Yet it's important to note that multicookers and slow cookers are kissing cousins, doing the same work on different schedules.

For some, it might be easier to put together a meal in the slow cooker in the morning before work and return to lovely aromas at the end of the day.

Her recipe for murgh makhani is fantastic, and as long as your spice drawer is well stocked, her recipes are surprisingly easy to make.

Madhur Jaffrey likes getting technical—for example, cooking chili powder, paprika, turmeric, garlic, ginger, and other spices together with a bit of water on low pressure to get the flavors to marry.

The pressure cooker is a fantastic way to hard-boil eggs, rendering them surprisingly easy to peel, and my favorite dish in the book is her Hyderabadi hard-boiled eggs in a garlicky red sauce with tamarind, mustard seeds, curry leaves, fenugreek, and nigella, all perfect over that exemplary rice.

Read enough slow-cooker and multicooker cookbooks and you begin seeing recurring recipes, as if pork shoulder, mac and cheese, turkey chili, and five other kinds of chili were all part of an unspoken framework without which the whole genre would collapse.

Sticking this book in among the multicooker books isn't as subversive as it sounds; intrepid pressure-cooker people can figure out how to adapt many of these recipes to a multicooker.

Whether you're new to pressure cooking or an old pro, you can rest easy knowing its recipes are rock solid.

If you’d rather take your time preparing Clark's lamb tagine with apricots and olives by letting the dish stew slowly all day instead of throwing it together in a mad rush before dinner, she is particularly good at highlighting the option to “cook it slow.” On many of the recipes, Clark explains how to adjust the ingredients to make things work perfectly in a slow cooker, or even the slow-cook setting on your multicooker.