We've talked about useless gadgets and useful ones, but these mostly recent tools didn't include some of our real favorite kitchen gadgets. Ingenious kitchen devices have been around for hundreds of years, and we love some of the most old-fashioned ones. So here, from apple peeler to cherry pitter, are some of our very favorite old-school kitchen gadgets.
• 1 Apple Peeler/Corer - When you're peeling and coring a ton of apples for preserving, this amazing gadget is magic. My father-in-law has a serious love for these; they're just plain fun to use, too.
• 2 Mortar and Pestle - The mortar and pestle is almost universal gadget, timeless and simple. Nearly every cuisine has some sort of herb-and-spice-bashing device, and most of them look remarkably like the mortars and pestles we still use today.
• 3 Cherry Pitter - Like the apple peeler, this solidly ingenious gadget wasn't just a convenient device: it was a necessity for farm kitchens putting up pounds and pounds of cherries at once.
• 4 Meat Grinder - Move aside, food processor. The old-fashioned meat grinder ground sausage and other meats for many, many years before electric gadgets ever came along.
• 5 Eggbeater - Until the advent of the electric mixer, the mechanical eggbeater or mixer was the most newfangled way a cook could mix up meringue. One of our favorite literary food scenes has a turn-of-the-century Vienna cook insisting that an eggbeater would only come into her kitchen over her dead body.
Useful, useless, or just curious: Do you have any favorite old-fashioned or antique kitchen gadgets?
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Oh I am so getting that cherry pitter. This June my hands were stained purple from all the hours of cherry pitting I did.
Apple peeler/corer? Alton Brown would be ashamed :(
as a child, I had somewhat of an obsession with those old fashioned egg beaters. I'm not sure why. I always begged my mom to get one whenever I saw one - not that we needed it or that I even baked yet at that age. She always told me when I got my own place, she'd buy me one lol. And you know what? She did! I never really used it, and it ended up breaking (it was a cheap-o one) after only a few uses.
To this day, if I see one, I always have to pick it up and give it a whirl. Still love them, even if my kitchenaid could out whip it by a million meringues to one!
The apple peeler IS fun. My best friend got one when we were in our 20's, and invited me over to test it; we each had so much fun taking turns impaling the apple and turning the crank and watching it peel, core, and slice each apple that we didn't notice how many we'd done until it was too late.
We ended up having to bake four pies.
Graciela: Alton Brown might be ashamed, but if you can apple pie filling, like my family does, you wouldn't care. Peeling, slicing and coring 30 lbs of apples by hand is SO not worth the extra cupboard space.
And they really ARE disgustingly fun to use. The peel spins off in ribbons; my sis and I used to steal them and eat long thin ribbons of apple peel until we felt ill.
i'm not sure why alton brown would have a problem with that. it's not like it only works for apples (well, most of the ones i've seen), and the one i know also slices if you want. but anyway, and apple peeling machine isn't any less useful than just a peeler. you can do potatoes and stuff too.
why you would pick on that and not the cherry pitter is beyond me.
Deliriumsama, would you share your recipe for canned apple pie filling? What a great idea.
actually, the cherry pitter is also not a unitasker.... think olives ;-) the apple peeler also works well on raw potatoes.... Like the other poster mentioned, it really has to do with the amount and frequency of the task at hand. Peeling 30 lbs of apples is not something my wrist would appreciate. Even with my lovely sharp Y-peeler.
I don't have either, but have been thinking about getting a (much smaller handheld) cherry pitter in order to pit kalamata olives quickly. (and like Alton, I'm normally very anti-gadget)
If you don't have a cherry pitter and have pounds of cherries to pit, it's easy to make a very effective one. You'll need:
3 thin finishing nails
1 piece of scrap wood (but clean)
Nail the three finishing nails through the wood. They should be in a very tight triangle formation just a half centimeter away from each other. You'll want nails that are long enough that they'll stick out about 1-inch on the other side of the wood.
Turn the piece of wood over. You'll have a little triangle of nail points facing up at you.
Now, take a cherry and point the stem side up. Pierce the bottom of the cherry with the three nail points and push until you've pushed the pit up through the stem end. Discard pit and repeat.
This works great. Less splatter than a real pitter and quick once you get the feel for it. Plus, it's one less gadget to store in the kitchen. I toss it when my cherries are safely preserved and frozen for the season, and make a new one the next year (my husband always has leftover wood scraps and nails around the shop somewhere).
Apple peelers on the other hand - not so easy to recreate :)
My cherry pitter is a bottle and a chopstick. And bashing Kalamatas with the side of a hefty cook's knife usually pits them.
the gilhoolie is also a great gadget. it's a jar and lid opener and it always works. and who doesn't like to say "gilhoolie"? :)