Unsung icons: Kitchen gadgets How many is too many?

COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE

For many years – decades even – we Australians cooked our food in one of three ways: we baked, boiled or grilled. This holy gastronomic triumvirate could be applied to almost every foodstuff and all occasions, from barbie to bar mitzvah. But somewhere in the mid 1970s to ’80s, all that changed.

Gens X, Y and millennials like to kid ourselves that we were at the forefront of Australia’s culinary awakening – an era where young celebrity chefs including Curtis Stone (now selling hams for Coles) and artists such as Tetsuya Wakuda (still collecting more hats than Samuel L Jackson in a Kangol outlet) brought us blinking into the light of a gourmet renaissance. No disrespect to either of those fine gents, but we had designs and pretensions to fancy up the menu before any of them knew their cornichons from their Cornish hens.

The Karens, Heathers and Keiths of Australia were not only guided by our own talismans – take a bow Bernard King – but invested in hardware that blew the neighbours’ dinner party out of the Perrier. One of the first of these was the rotisserie feature included in certain cutting-edge ovens – no longer did you have to schlep to the chicken shop to see glistening rotating poultry. Simply impale a decent size Ingham’s onto the horizontal plane, flip the required switches and return hours later to succulent flesh. Younger members of the family could also treat the oven as an erstwhile television set, complete with picture window to watch the spinning show with a strict ‘do not touch’ protocol in place. And at times it was actually more entertaining than the cricket. Meanwhile, those older relos who had lived through the Depression would join in the fun by pointing out that the congealed half-inch of fat in the bottom of the oven “made for some damn fine eatin’” – or words to that effect – and that it went by the oh-so-delicious term “dripping”. And back when cholesterol sounded like a fancy Spanish seaside resort, they were right.

Then there was the pressure cooker. Have a guess when it was invented? We’ll give you a free subscription if you get it right without Googling. [Editor’s note – columnist is forthwith banned from using the words “free subscription”.] Try 1679 and going by the way snappier title of Papin’s Digester. It used supercharged steam to reduce cooking time, preserve vitamin content and obliterate the texture out of almost anything it touched. Undeniably convenient, it was the mush-have item of the day. Everyone also had an urban legend story about their cousin/uncle/colleague who forgot to secure the Papin’s Digester lid securely, only to be lifted from the couch by an explosion, which concerned the neighbours and made the kitchen look like the floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio.

Possessing an equal level of time-saving possibilities and the potential for simmering malevolence were slow cookers, the idea being that you could set them in the morning, head off to work and return to a cooked casserole. Like pressure cookers, slow cookers became exponentially safer and less accident-prone over the years, but almost everyone over 40 will have an explosive tale about one. It should also be pointed out that slow cookers are today marketed under the more inclusive terms “developmentally delayed cookers”.

Oddly, at the same time we were investing in tech for very specific purposes – the 2020 equivalent being the sous vide machine – there was a hankering to consolidate a bunch of other cooking techniques in one roaring churning blitzing unit. Enter the Magimix, which was invented in 1971 in France and still lays claim to being the OG food processor. (You can ask the kids what ‘OG’ means later; suffice to say it’s a positive.) The promise it made – and noisily fulfilled – was to perform the functions of up to eight other kitchen machines and just lived for slicing, grating, chopping, whisking, blending and baking. It was the Swiss Army knife of kitchen gadgets.

Honourable mentions must go to the used-maybe-twice-a-year fondue pots, which presented the always-fun combination of an

“POSSESSING AN equal LEVEL OF TIME-SAVING POSSIBILITIES AND THE POTENTIAL FOR simmering malevolence WERE SLOW COOKERS”

open flame and hot oil or white wine. Flammability issues aside, the litres of melted cheese was a cardiologist’s nightmare.

Interestingly, many of these gadgets are still around in some incarnation today, aesthetically contemporary, operationally streamlined and still impressing guests at dinner parties. All that’s really changed is today’s Lululemon-ed, downward dogging, keto-munching grandparents – who wouldn’t go near dripping if their franking credits depended on it.