So there I was, three steps behind the Zeitgeist. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to find one of those old slow cookers, a crockpot? Sure it seems kind of daggy but, with a few minutes' preparation in the morning, I would be able to leave the machine to its own devices, bubbling away on the bench, and come home to a proper meal and the kinds of smells that are hard to replicate with a humid plastic bag of takeaway.

Then I went to the shops and discovered there was nothing original in my thinking. There were rows and rows of the cookers: little ones, big ones, programmable ones with electronic settings. It seems the crockpot is this year's answer to the foot spa: the latest fad in small appliances.

After choosing a cheap one and lugging it to the car, I started wondering about recipes, assuming I'd have to scour second-hand shops for books devoted to slow cookers.

But there was no need to go second-hand. The slow-cooker revival has been bubbling away long enough that there is now a genre of cookery books devoted to its worship. A suite of titles has been published in the past couple of years alone, including Slow Cookers: The Slow Cooker Recipes You Must Have by Jane Price and Slow Cooker: Easy and Delicious Recipes for All Seasons by Sally Wise. In the past month alone there have been another two books published which are dedicated to slow cookers. (Although it must be said that for every hundred recipes about 90 involve some kind of meat in a brownish sauce).

Even the pressure cooker is enjoying a renaissance, traumatic memories of grey beans and exploding pans having finally receded from the collective conscious. An entire range of shiny metal cookers is proudly displayed in a department store in the eastern suburbs, alongside the title A Pressure Cooker Saved My Life: How to Have It All, Do It All, and Keep It All Together, by the newsreader Juanita Phillips, a guide to juggling work and children as much as a recipe book. It follows last year's title The Pressure Cooker Recipe Book: More than 80 Delicious Recipes Using This Safe, Time-Saving and Energy-Efficient Way to Cook by Suzanne Gibbs, a daughter of Margaret Fulton.

So what on earth is going on? The revival has been attributed to a renewed interest in thrifty home cooking sparked by fears of a recession. Both slow cookers and pressure cookers tenderise cheap cuts of meat. And, in spite of anecdotal reports of cheap cuts such as lamb shanks increasing in price due to rising popularity, they remain much more affordable than the alternatives. In the past three years lamb shanks have gone up 84¢ a kilogram, to $8.73, and lamb cutlets have risen $3.60, to $29.77, according to retail butcher prices from Meat and Livestock Australia.

But thrift is not the only driver. The other driver is lack of time. Whether you are making an eight-hour risotto in a slow cooker or an eight-minute one with a pressure cooker, in both cases you are creating a proper home-cooked meal with only a tiny bit of effort, and serving dinner within minutes of walking in the door.

Taking these factors together, thrift and time, perhaps what the revival is really about is a renewed interest in what used to be called home economics, the kind that is about running an efficient, modern home rather than retreating to fantasies of domestic goddesses or elaborate gourmet cookery.

Home economics was not a popular high school subject for women my age and younger because we were supposed to aim higher than housewifery. And yet many of us are discovering that with the rise of dual career families, deft home-making skills are more important than ever, for both genders.

Anyone can order takeaway. The real challenge is finding innovative ways to run a household so that the entire second income is not eaten up by the cost of the scaffolding that makes it possible, such as formal childcare, transport and takeaway food. If only someone could invent a gadget to solve all that.

Originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. Reproduced with permission from Lisa Pryor.