This year is a bumper crop of berries, says Scott Goldsmith as he peels and slices strawberries on a rainy Friday, brandishing a bright red plastic wagon-wheel-shaped device called a Pushberry. He said he could do all of these things at once.
The avocado is still hot, he added, gesturing to the flexicado and avocado. Two of his many slicers and pitters sold in his store, all painted in acid-green plastic (kitchenware designers seem to be aiming for biomimicry). When it comes to tenacious kale, the famous green of the past decade, its grooming aids include loose leaf and swift strips, also known as kale leaf strippers, that you might not have known you had. It is a solution to a problem that cannot be solved.
Mr. Goldsmith, 61, is the third-generation owner and kitchenware impresario of S. Feldman Housewares, a glitzy bazaar on Manhattan's Upper East Side. On a morning this April, his shelves were filled with esoteric items like wavy yellow silicone food pods (a combination steamer and colander, $14.99 that look like plants imagined by the production designers of “Star Trek”). It was full of products. SpreadTHAT Titanium Butter Knife (“It's pretty cool,” Goldsmith said. “It uses the heat of your hands. I don't really eat butter, but I don't discriminate.” $19.95) . Onion Goggles ($19.95). and a sequined apron ($120) that was a big hit last Christmas.
How do you wash your apron? “I don't know,” he said.
Mr. Goldsmith's long career in retail spans decades of equipment including truffle shavers and cherry pitters, salad shooters and spiralizers, and traces a history of ingenuity, optimism and sheer eccentricity. Masu. If you think that kitchen appliance manufacturers have finally collectively lost their minds after hearing about the invention of a device for defoliating cruciferous vegetables, Mr. Goldsmith, whose shop has been in business since his 1929 It will remind you of that.
“Just between you and me, most of these things can be done with a knife.”
For industrial designers, the world of possible kitchen tools is endless. Rethinking complex items like toasters and simple items like potato peelers, Tucker Vee Meister, founder of Smart His Designs, says there are few things that can't benefit from a proper rethink. said.
When the smartly designed Oxo Good Grip Peeler, with its thick, comfortable rubber handle and fixed blade, hit the market in 1990, it was something of a revolution. “On the one hand, designers are very optimistic because they think they can make things better,” he said. “On the other hand, we think everything is wrong or broken.”
In Thinking Forks: A History of How We Cook and Eat (2012), British food writer Bea Wilson explores how technology, social mores, and food trends have influenced We explored how these collisions have produced brilliant gizmos.
New technology has made entire categories obsolete. When stoves were installed in place of open hearths, the hasteners, skewers, skewers jacks, and skewers dogs that accompanied them disappeared. Technology has changed the way we eat. After the Cuisinart, we were swimming in puree, a situation that Wilson says contributed to today's solidly artisanal cuisine, and that “somebody's hands were tired and they were making it.” It is said that it was highly prized.
She writes: “When a new gadget comes along, we often use it with too much enthusiasm until the novelty wears off.”
She continued, “For a woman who just got an electric mixer, the whole world looks like soup.”
In terms of pure functionality, Ms. Wilson said recently, “few new gadgets have improved on sharp knives, better heat sources, and dexterous hands.”
“But they always reflect our obsessions and desires,” she added. “In Victorian times, we had slow cutters, but most of us today live without one, because shredding cabbage is nothing like that. Anyone who owns a kale stripper… I'm confirming to myself that kale is a big part of my life.”
Ten years ago, “half of the products sold in cookware stores were cupcake-related,” she says.
“But now we've moved on. It seems like a lot of our culinary desires have shifted to veganism, which led to the incredible success of the spiralizer.” When spiralizers started coming out, I had the feeling they were doomed to quickly become obsolete, but I was totally wrong. Maybe it's because of low-carb diets, or maybe it's the #plantbased trend on Instagram. Maybe it's because of prominence, but it turns out that the ability to turn beets and zucchini into something resembling telephone wires has more appeal than I thought.”
Christopher Kimball, a staunchly skeptical cooking show host and co-founder of two Boston-based Food Networks, America's Test Kitchen and Milk Street, has identified three categories of kitchenware: . There are things that are completely stupid and useless, things that don't deserve storage space, and things that seem practical but can actually be done better with a knife.
“Properly designed tools are extremely valuable,” Kimball says. “But if it's a special item that you only use once a month, how much time and effort does it take?” do not have How to use it? ”
But Kimball is not immune to the siren song of some gizmos. A few years ago, at the International Home and Houseware Show, the food industry's annual gadget fest held every March in Chicago, Mr. Kimball unexpectedly discovered the Beep Egg, an adorable egg-shaped timer for boiling eggs. I realized that I was moved. When you reach your desired doneness, whether it's soft, hard, or somewhere in between, BeepEgg will play a song (such as “Killing Me Softly” for soft-boiled).
Kimball also admitted that he had bought all the egg poachers over the years, although he said, “At the end of the day, it's not that hard to cook eggs.”
In 2016, the last year for which sales figures are available, kitchen tools and accessories accounted for more than 13% of all household products, valued at $87.1 billion, according to the International Housewares Association's State of the Industry Report. , an increase of 6% compared to this. 2015.
Howard Chiu, an engineer who worked in the robotics and aerospace fields, quit his day job two and a half years ago when his invention was shortlisted for an innovation award at a Chicago trade show. Chiu is the man behind SpreadTHAT, an idea inspired by watching children tear apart toast while trying to spread cold butter on it.
Drawing on his background, he coated conductive tubes with titanium to create a device that could be heated by the heat of your hands. SpreadTHAT sold well in its first year, so Mr. Chiu built his brand on that principle (His HeatTHAT on his gravy warmer, his ScoopTHAT on his ice cream scooper, his ScoopTHAT on his meat thawing machine). products such as ThawTHAT).
Ten years ago, Craig and Anna Stewart were designing in the furniture industry when they had an aha moment. Stewart was in the middle of making stuffed chicken breasts using her grandmother's recipe, but she didn't have any string or toothpicks. She wondered why there wasn't something reusable she could tie food to. “Silicone has been around for a long time, but we were the first to use it inside a pot,” Stewart said. They designed food loops (packets of silicone truss yarn) in psychedelic hues. “Fukusenta” is what they called the first version of hot pink. That way you'll see it instead of throwing it in the trash.
“We sold 500,000 units the first year,” Stewart said. Like Mr. Chiu, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart quit their jobs and started a company called Fusionbrands with their first product. The Feldmans' very distinctive-looking food pods are their handiwork (Stewart said they were inspired by sea urchins), and the slim pods were a finalist for the Innovation Award at this year's Housewares Show. So is the EggXactPeel, a yellow plastic shell breaker and peeler.
Amanda Hesser, food writer and co-founder and CEO of kitchen and home website Food52, says her company continually evaluates products as they develop them for sale. I am. She's an expert at obsolescence, and she has a keen eye for what has legs. But even Mr. Hesser has an unsuitable drawer in his kitchen, a mini-museum of old tools. She's particularly bothered by melon ballers, some of whom are models with pea-sized scoops (perhaps to tantalize “The Borrowers”, but otherwise useless). She also has an egg topper, a butter curler, and a shrimp peeler that slices the egg caps with Gallic precision.
Despite this weakness in the arcana, Hesser is not tempted by any particular new trend.
“Where do you draw the line when you go down the path of defoliating kale?” she said. This is something that comes up a lot in our reviews. Kitchen manufacturers tend to customize their products so closely that everyone will need his 5,000 square foot kitchen. Not to mention, you'll be missing out on the fun of tearing kale from its stalks. It's what gives tools all the fun. ”
“Be careful about making hasty judgments,” said essayist and novelist Sheryl Mendelson. “One person's useless tool often becomes the meaning of another's life. My pastry blender was thrust upon me with passionate love by someone I couldn't live without. I gave up after one try.'' Ms. Mendelsohn is the author of “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.'' This 896-page book was a publishing sensation when it was released in 1999, and is a passionate guide to the turn of the millennium.
The book is known for its thoroughness and rigor, and it also reflects Ms. Mendelsohn's enduring love of cooking, as she is also a lawyer and teaches philosophy at Barnard College. Coincidentally, she recently cleaned out her drawers and was left with some strange items: the aforementioned pastry blender, a cherry pitter, two garlic presses, a toast rack, and a pasta noodle slicer.
Mendelsohn said she once imagined herself as someone who would put a toast rack on her family's breakfast table and make her own pasta. It was these fantasies, ideas about selfhood, that stopped them from doing so, she said.
All of this reminded Mendelsohn of a William James joke. Apparently there are two.
“This is what's interesting,” she said. “If a philosophical theory is useless, if it is of no use in a philosophical sense,” James was fond of saying, it reminded me of a funeral with a broken sedan chair. The story was about an old Irishman who was being carried to a church. There was no floor in the chair, so the old man had to run in it. “Faith,'' says the man, “if for honor Otherwise, I might be better off walking.”
Mendelsohn added that pasta slicers have a reputation and therefore need to be treated with caution.
