An Architectural Alphabet Book from 1773

My mother loved to use her pressure cooker. I was always scared of it and refuse to use one even now decades later. After she got a full time job making supper fell to me and my brother. One day he was supposed to put a whole chicken with all the fixings (potatoes, veggies and spices/herbs) into the pressure cooker so we would have a nice cooked meal for later on. He put the thing on the stove on high heat and forgot about it. It exploded. The lid went through the window. The pot shot onto the floor and made a huge crater. Chicken grease and bits of meat, bone and veggies were everywhere. De-greasing a kitchen is no easy task. At least that was the end of pressure cookers in our house.

Strangely, I want to make the opposite - a vacuum cooker. It's jam making season, but I find it's too easy to overcook jam while trying to remove enough water to make it a) set and b) preserve the fruit properly.
It occurs to me that if I can drop the pressure I can remove enough water without reaching such high temperatures. Trouble is, vacuum pumps of sufficient throughput aren't cheap.

Slow cooker all the way! Pressure cooker scares me :(

My mom always used a pressure cooker for canning and taught me how (after I was in my teens and AFTER she'd instilled a healthy respect and a bit of fear in me about it). And we never had any disasters. But I, too, am scared of them and happy enough to do things some other way now! My favorite is also the slow cooker now. And for canning? Water bath and seal or oven- both work well.