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Idiom: Cooking with gas
You either cook with natural gas or have an electric induction heating (IH) stove if you live in Japan.
These days, if someone says you’re cooking with gas, they are not referring to how supper will be prepared this evening.
The phrase is used to mean you are making excellent progress or doing something very well.
It has an interesting origin.
Back in the 1920s and 30s, most people used wood or coal-fired stoves to cook and heat their homes.
The kitchen stove often served the dual purpose of heating the home and cooking meals.
That’s the reason why, traditionally, the kitchen was the main room in a Western home.
When visitors came to my house during my childhood, they would sit in the kitchen with my parents, smoke, drink, eat and discuss something.
No one ever went into the living room.
Anyways, in the 30s, electricity and natural gas were starting to become famous for cooking.
“Now, we’re cooking with gas!” originated in the mid to late 1930s as an advertising slogan thought up by the natural gas industry to convince people to use gas rather than electricity to power their kitchen stoves.
We live in a capitalist society, and that has dramatically affected the language we speak.
It’s why a phrase as famous as cooking with gas first entered the language as a marketing slogan but eventually became an idiom, meaning things are going very well, and we are making progress.
The next time one of your projects or tasks is going like gangbusters, remember to say, ‘Now, I’m cooking with gas!’
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 65.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.