I remember my mother using the expression "cooking with gas" referenced in a recent AWWW broadcast. She would occasionally augment the expression to "cooking with gas on the left front burner," presumably the most powerful of the burners on the stove top. This may have been unique to her, since I don't see reference to it on the interwebs.
I do find an occasional "raining cats and dogs and horses ... . " or some such.
More than augmenting idioms, I appreciate the apt twist of an idiom. Sometimes this borders on punnish bad taste. But when it is good it is very, very good. e.g. "Through the Valley of the Shadow of Debt."
People say I overdo puns so I may as well overdo one here.
"It's raining cats and dogs outside and I just stepped in a poodle."
Glenn said: I remember my mother using the expression "cooking with gas" ...
I swear I recall seeing some ads by the local utility when I was a child. They were "plumbing" our small town with distribution lines for natural gas, a new option at that time, as most people heated with fuel oil or coal. There was a promo ad being run on TV (and newspapers) showing a happy housewife cooking on her new gas range. The voice-over extolled the benefits of gas as a heat source. The ad ended with "Now you're cooking with gas."
Seems to me that ad would have to predate its use as the idiom you asked about. Ngrams shows a spike in usage at that point in time (the 50s). Curiously, it also shows usage ramping-up starting around 1890. Wiki tells me natural gas distribution began in New York in 1825, and that's about where the first "blip" appears on Ngrams. An etymology search found nothing.
Does anyone else recall this ad campaign?
From what I've read, "Now You're Cooking With Gas" was popularized by Bob Hope around 1940, and originated by Deke Houlgate, in the WWI era, when Deke was working for the American Gas Association. That doesn't fly with me; I think Hope was a Bob-come-lately to this particular rodeo..Â
Comics don't normally inject lines into the language; they appropriate lines people are familiar with, and perhaps use them in a new context.  You might as well have credited Steve Martin with, "Well, excuuuuuuse me!" by ignoring the fact that it was pretty common even when Martin was born.
They used "Now you're cooking with gas!" to promote towngas ranges in the 1920s or before, according to my grandmother in a conversation I overheard in the 1950s. I'm not exactly sure when towngas was popular. It was a low-energy gaseous fuel piped to homes and businesses, manufactured by municipalities by heating solid fuel in a process similar to how coke and charcoal are made, as I understand it. It was supplanted by less expensive natural gas when enough pipelines were built
deaconB, your grandma's memories -- and your memory of her memories -- would need to be backed up by printed evidence in order to change what is known about the origin of that phrase. There is no such evidence so far found that predates the 1930s. People's memories are terrible, so we simply can't rely upon them. (My favorite example of someone with a poor memory is the guy who swears he coined "laser," with the same meaning as we all know it -- a term for which we are 100% certain of the origin; his memory had it appearing much earlier, which was impossible.)
Also, "Comics don't normally inject lines into the language" is specious. Of course they do. It's the popularizer who matters, not the coiner, and it has always been so. Comics are often popularizers. Sometimes the popularizer *is* the coiner, of course, but still: there must be popularizers (or more than one) for a word, catchphrase, or idiom to catch on.