I have an Instant Pot electronic pressure cooker (otherwise known as a multi-cooker), and I give it house room because it cooks whole grains (especially brown rice) perfectly and works boffo as a stock pot. Now, I know you're all going to tell me just to put the stock pot on the back burner of the stove and go to bed, and I did just that for most of my increasingly long life, but I never slept soundly knowing that a gas hob was burning in the kitchen. The Instant Pot can be left unattended, and does not occupy a quarter of the high-value real estate of the stove top.

It also steams the Christmas pudding -- again, without supervision -- and does it in a quarter of the time required to do it the old-fashioned way, in the canner.

If your household eats in the vegetarian/vegan style, an electronic multi-cooker could be a game-changer. Here, the devices are marketed as time-savers, which is rather misleading. What they do is safely handle tasks that otherwise require personal attendance, allowing you to do other things. Where they do save time directly is in pre-cooking beans, which takes only about half an hour.

I tried cooking a pot roast in it and was disappointed in the texture of the meat: stringy. The Le Creuset enamelled iron pot remains unsurpassed for that job.