Can sharp knives beat these tools?
For decades, cooks have been falling in love with kitchen gadgets, gizmos
Berries are hot this year, Scott Goldsmith was saying on a recent rain-flecked Friday, brandishing a bright red plastic, wagon wheel-shaped gizmo called a PushBerry, which aims to hull and slice your strawberries in one go.
Avocados are still hot, he added, gesturing at the Flexicado and the Avoquado — two of the many slicers and pitters for sale in his store, all rendered in acid green plastic (designers of kitchen gadgets seem to go in for biomimicry).
As for tenacious kale, this decade’s celebrity green, its grooming aids now include the Looseleaf and the Swiftstrip, otherwise known as kale leaf strippers, the solution to a problem you might not know you had.
Goldsmith, 61, is the thirdgeneration owner of S. Feldman Housewares — a glittering bazaar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — and an impresario of kitchen gadgetry. His shelves were bursting with esoterica, like the billowy yellow silicone Food Pod (a combination steamer and colander that looks like vegetation imagined by the production designers of
Star Trek, $14.99 U.S.); the SpreadTHAT titanium butter knife (“It’s pretty cool,” Goldsmith said. “It uses the heat of your hands. I don’t eat much butter, but I don’t discriminate,” $19.95); onion goggles ($19.95); and sequined aprons ($120) that were a big hit last Christmas. How do you wash the aprons? “I have no idea,” he said.
Goldsmith’s long retail career spans decades of gadgetry — in- cluding truffle shavers and cherry pitters, Salad Shooters and spiralizers — and traces a history of ingenuity, optimism and sheer whimsy. If the invention of defoliating devices for cruciferous vegetables causes you to think the makers of kitchen gadgets have finally and collectively lost their minds, Goldsmith will remind you that his store has been in business since 1929. “Between you and me,” he said, “most of these things you can do with a knife.”
To an industrial designer, the universe of possible kitchen tools is infinite. Very few objects would not benefit from a good rethinking, said Tucker Viemeister, a founder of Smart Design, among other companies, who has reimagined items as complex as a toaster, and as simple as a potato peeler.
In 1990, when Smart Design’s Oxo Good Grip peeler hit the market, with its fat, comfy rubber handle and fixed blade, it was a kind of revolution. “On the one hand, designers are really optimistic because they think they can make things better,” he said. “On the other hand, we think everything is wrong or broken.”
In Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (2012), Bee Wilson, the English food writer, explored how technology, social mores and food fashions have long collided to create a pageantry of gizmos.
New technologies rendered entire categories obsolete; when stoves replaced the open hearth, the hasteners, spits, spit jacks and spit dogs that attended them vanished. Technology has altered the meal itself. After the Cuisinart, we were swimming in purées, a situation Wilson said had contributed to the robust artisanal fare of today, prized because “someone’s hand had been tired out making it.”
As she wrote, “the birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty wears off.”
In terms of pure function, Wilson said recently, “very few new gadgets are any improvement on a sharp knife, a good source of heat and a dexterous pair of hands.
“But they reflect our obsessions and wants at any given time,” she added.
“The Victorians had slaw cutters, which most of us today manage without, because shredded cabbage is not such a thing. The person who owns a kale stripper is confirming to themselves that kale is a big part of his or her life.”
A decade ago, “half the items for sale in cookware shops seemed to be cupcake-related,” she said.
“But now we have moved on.”