9 Weird & Wonderful Retro Kitchen Gadgets
Human beings are a creative, inventive species. Sometimes those inventions shake the entire world and transform civilization, like the printing process. Other times, they leave us shaking our heads and wondering why anyone would create such a thing. That’s how we feel about the 1970s “egg cuber,” a strange creation we’ll explore below.
Just like our customers, we’re passionate about all things related to kitchens and cooking here at Hauslane. That’s why we’ve assembled this list of nine kitchen gadgets from bygone days. Some are useful, others are absurd, but all are fascinating.
1. Vacuum Coffee Maker
This 1930s device looks like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, but it’s actually used to make a delicious cup of coffee. It’s an early model of a siphon coffee maker, which is still in use today at hipster cafes in Tokyo and other urban centers. While Aeropresses and other coffee brewing methods are more popular at the moment, it shows you how long humanity has sought to create the perfect cup of coffee.
The coffee vacuum works by heating water in the lower chamber until the rising vapor forces the water up through a siphon tube and into the top chamber. The hot water mixes with the grounds for a bit. You then remove the heat. As the lower chamber cools, it creates a vacuum that draws the brewed coffee through a filter.
It must have produced a savory cup of joe. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be around today in its various permutations.
2. The Famous Veg-O-Matic
The 1960s Veg-O-Matic was an all-purpose kitchen tool used to cut vegetables. If you’ve ever heard the famous line: “It slices, it dices!” then you now know its origin story. That tagline comes from the original Veg-O-Matic commercial that would hit late-night TV watchers back in the day.
Today, we use that line to make fun of salespeople demonstrating a glitzy product, often with no idea where it originally came from. It’s one of the first products ever sold in that infomercial style, and it sold quite well—carving (or slicing?) out a name for itself in American popular culture.
It sliced, it diced, and it did a bunch of other stuff. Although it’s hard to say whether it did any of those things better than ordinary kitchen knives.
3. Soda Siphon Seltzer Bottle
This 1920s soda siphon is a reusable, pressurized bottle that creates and dispenses sparkling water from the source. Today, we just buy club soda. Between 1920 and 1960, however, it was helpful to have one of these fancy gadgets in your liquor cabinet.
Can’t you just picture F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Great Gatsby fame, using one of these to make swanky cocktails from high-shelf booze?
4. Apple Peeler and Corer from 1903
In case you thought the only real progress in kitchen gadgets came in the past 100 years, you need to see this apple peeler and corer from the turn of the last century. Like something out of a steampunk novel, this gear-driven device could simultaneously peel, core, and even spiral cut an apple.
Why would you want to spiral cut an apple? It was perfect for pies and preserves, as well as kid-friendly snacks. That’s what historians tell us, at least. It could be that early 20th-century Americans were just as fascinated by weird kitchen gadgets as the thousands of people who purchased the Veg-O-Matic 60 years later.
Either way, it made its place into at least one museum, and it earned its spot on our list of fascinating kitchen gadgets.
5. The Moo Cow Creamer
Jumping back to the 1950s, here’s a device you may remember if you’re over 40, since people kept using them until the 80s. This novelty, cow-shaped container pours cream or milk from its mouth.
Come to think of it, that’s a little disturbing. Let’s move on.
6. Egg Scale
Today, we take it for granted that we can walk into any supermarket and pick out a carton of eggs that are all the same size and all clearly labeled. Back in the 1940s, they just gave you a dozen eggs, and it was up to you to sort them.
That’s where the egg scale came in handy. If you were baking a cake that called for eggs of a certain size, you could proceed with all the confidence and precision that baking requires.
Why not use a regular scale? You have to think back to a time when baking was an everyday occurrence. The egg scale was perfectly calibrated to classify each egg by size, and it was designed to prevent the eggs from rolling onto the counter and cracking.
7. Mechanical Egg Beater from the late 1800s
We promised you a few highly useful tools, and this one fits the bill. The geared, mechanical egg beater goes back to 1885 when Willis Johnson took egg beating to new heights. Previous versions of the egg beater existed, but nothing as ingenious as this—nothing with rotary gears, and nothing that would one day inspire the electric egg beaters we know and love today.
What is particularly inspiring about Johnson is that, as an African American inventor, he overcame hurdles in a country that had only recently abolished slavery and granted him the right to vote. He patented his idea and helped push the world of kitchen gadgets into the modern era.
8. The Spritz Cookie Gun
This glue-gun-style cookie press from the 1950s let you pour cookie dough into a tube and shoot out cookies into fun, clever shapes. Made from metal or plastic, it extrudes dough onto baking sheets in the form of stars, flowers, trees, and other designs.
Fun (or chaos?) for the whole family, depending on how the kids used it!
9. The Egg Cuber
Last (and least useful) is the egg cuber—a novelty kitchen gadget from the era that brought us bell-bottoms, lava lamps, and other sorts of wonderful weirdness.
The egg cuber didn’t stand the test of time like the egg beater, and it’s easy to see why. There’s absolutely nothing appealing about a cubed egg, unless you prefer your breakfast with an otherworldly, post-apocalyptic twinge.
Thankfully, someone kept one of these things around for posterity and posted it to Flickr. Its strangeness allowed us to round out our list of nine retro kitchen gadgets that amaze and bewilder.
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