Dan Pashman, the voluble host of the public radio podcast “The Sporkful,” was on Twitter the other day, going on about slow cookers.

“Everyone loves slow cookers,” he wrote. “They’re the Willie Nelson of kitchen appliances.”

It’s a great line, but — with all due respect! — it’s inaccurate. Slow cookers are more like the Canadian rock band Nickelback. They sell like crazy, and a lot of people hate them. They promise joy. They too often deliver mush.

Certainly there are a lot of slow cookers in our kitchens or, at any rate, sitting in our kitchen cabinets. There are over 600,000 searches involving the words “slow cooker” on Google every month. Euromonitor, a consumer research company that among other things analyzes trends in the business of countertop appliances, estimates that slow-cooker sales have almost doubled in the United States since the start of the century.

The global slow-cooker market, Euromonitor reports, was more than $1 billion in 2014. Jarden, which produces the Crock-Pot brand slow cooker, introduced in 1971, sold 4.4 million of them last year.