The
Times ran a piece I wrote on my top six innovations in the kitchen. This is
what I wrote:
The desire for convenience, for labour-saving devices, has
been a dream that has shaped the modern kitchen. Sometimes labour-saving was
merely labour-displacing: a 1950s dishwasher had a cycle of just three minutes
(compared with an average of ninety minutes today) but every single item had to
be packed in its own separate plastic container and then unpacked afterwards. But
labour wasn't the only thing that needed saving – so too did space and money.
Space was saved with items and devices that could have multiple functions – a
stool that was also an ironing board as well as a step ladder, for instance.
Money was saved, not just through scrimping but also by spending. At least
that’s what the advertisers were telling us: buy this expensive food processor
and save, save, save.
Kitchen devices came with a price tag that was social as
well as financial. Fridges and freezers, for instance, sounded the death knell
for neighbourhood shops and announced the era of the supermarket. And all the
gizmos that found a place in the post-war kitchen could be seen as an attempt
to return women to the kitchen to create more and more complex dishes after a
wartime spent out of the house in paid employment.
While gadgetry has put the kit in kitchens, changes in energy
and the introduction of new materials that have had the most significant effect.
The shift from solid fuels (primarily coal) to piped and wired fuels (gas and
electricity) was decisive, but it wasn't till after World War Two that many
rural communities would be on the grid. Today it is probably hard to imagine
kitchens without a host of synthetic materials like Teflon and silicone; in the
1950s and 60s it was new forms of plastic that transformed the kitchen.
1. Electric
Kettle. This electric kettle from the 1920s would have boiled water much faster
than a pan on the stove. It would also have been cleaner because most stoves
used solid fuel in the 20s. Ubiquitous electricity was needed for the electric
kettle to become an everyday reality.
2. Fridge-Freezer.
The first fridges were often gas powered, but it was the electric version that
came to stay. My parents bought me a small fridge in 1987 and it cost exactly
the same amount as the first fridge they had bought when they got married thirty
years earlier in 1957.
3. The
food mixer. If you could afford it US imports like the Sunbeam Mixmaster were
available in Britain from the 1930s. They could ‘mix drinks, grind coffee, open
cans, turn ice cream, polish silverware, sharpen knives and scissors’. A
home-grown version became popular in the 1950s when Ken Wood developed his
Kenwood Chef.
4. Spitfire
saucepans. These saucepans from the 1946 exhibition ‘Britain Can Make It’
utilised a manufacturing process discovered while trying to develop longer lasting
exhaust stubs for Spitfires during the war. Other domestic appliances that were
developed during the war included the electric blanket, for pre-central heating
living.
5.
Plastics. New synthetic material such as composite
vinyl and melamine transformed the kitchen in the 1950s and 60s. Here Dunlop claimed
that their 1967 Vynolay range could ‘cover a fair-sized kitchen floor for as
little as £5’.
6.
Vegetable Peeler. The Rex vegetable peeler (from
the Swiss company Zena) is a classic design: simple, cheap, and superbly
functional. It was first produced in 1947 and soon found its place in kitchens
all over the world. Sometimes it is the small and modest that makes the
difference.
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