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Right: the Prestige hand

mixer. Below: a wooden

salad bowl and servers.

In his new book,

The Modern Kitchen,

writer and restaurateur

Tim Hayward traces the

evolution of the everyday

objects that changed

the way we cook.

tools

Top-drawer

WOODEN SALAD BOWL

AND TOSSERS

The wooden salad bowl with matching

wooden tossers – preferably purchased

while on holiday in Provence and never,

ever washed – is a ritual object in the well-

equipped home kitchen. Restaurants and

other commercial establishments have

naturally avoided using a communal

serving vessel that can’t be properly

cleaned between uses. How on earth

did such an odd tradition arise?➤

HAND MIXER

In 1884, Willis Johnson of Cincinnatti,

Ohio, became one of the first African

Americans to receive a patent. He invented

a mechanical egg beater that differed from

the ones we might see today in that the

crank drove beaters in two large tanks.

The idea was that in the professional

bakery one tank could be cleaned while

the other was in operation. With its large

capacity and range of interchangeable

beaters, his machine could be said to

resemble an early manual Robot-Coupe

but the key element – a large cog driving

two small ones on the beater shafts –

carried on into every cranked hand

blender ever since.

In professional kitchens, meringues

and cream had traditionally been whipped

by hard-working underchefs with huge

forearms and balloon whisks, but the

hand-cranked whisk, its simple gearing

driving the beater heads in an impossible

blur of speed, made such delicate

confections possible in the home kitchen.

It was a brave host who attempted

a soufflé before the invention of the

hand whisk, and a negligent host who

didn’t once it was freely available.

F

or most of us our kitchens

and the objects in them are

the definition of “quotidian”

• so ordinary that they seem
  insignificant and near invisible. But
  objects so very close to us are the ones
  best evolved to our lives and most
  reflective of them. Every object has
  a design history; some manufactured
  objects have corporate “origin myths”.
  All are worthy of attention.