What bit of kit do you have in your kitchen or workshop that you possibly inherited from an earlier generation of your family, (or your grandparent had one you didn't inherit so you scoured junk shops till you found your own), that you wouldn't swap for modern technology, or even a modern version of the same?
I've watched F winding the handle on this thing loads of times. It turns my chicken into tiny pieces so I don't have to slice it up with my teeth (of which I have a lot missing). She also uses it for making falafel and for turning leftover roasted meat into pie filling and something she calls rissoles (they look like meatballs to me).
It it made of some cast metal that weighs enough to kill a cat if it fell on one. F is of the view that modern ones are flimsy by comparison. And she seems to have mastered the delicate balance that enables her to mince stuff up without it dancing all over the place. Mr B on the other hand can't load it, wind the handle and keep it all on one place (no matter how tightly he screws the clamp that holds it) because he doesn't seem to have enough hands for the job.
It turns out we have an electricity powered motor driven one with sausage making attachments and all, but she never uses it. It fits onto the big Kenwood cake mixer, which is also very seldom used (all cakes, biscuits, pies and puddings being mixed by hand), because F says assembly is a faff and it's noisy. She's very sensitive about noise.
The big mixer also takes up a lot of bench space. It gets dragged out of its cupboard for beating eggwhites for pavlova (a recent development in our kitchen), mixing brioche, and (also recently) to drive a blender to make gazpacho.
F's Narna (who might have been one previous owners of the old mincer) called her blender a 'vitamizer'. That is one of our digressions.
Another bit of 'old kit' is this thing F calls a mouli. She uses it whenever a recipe calls for something to be pushed through a sieve. It makes short work of that task. Her Mum used it for processing baby food, for processing tomatoes for canning, and for making smooth vegetable soup. There has been no processing of baby food in this house, soups get zapped with a stick blender these days, but the tomatoes for canning still go through this thing because nothing else deals to the skins like it does (and cooked tomato skins make F have furballs... that's another story). It also got used for turning cooked crab apples into puree when our tree in Havant was in full production - wind the handle, pulp out the bottom, skin, pips and stalks left in the top.
Finally there is this.... which does the job that big Kenwood might do, but hangs in a wall hook, requires no assembly, and wouldn't kill a cat if it fell on one.
I'm assured modern ones with the handle on the side simply don't 'cut it' - whatever that means.
This one is so old and so worn out that years ago F's Dad even bronze welded some of the worn out beater wires because 'you couldn't buy them like this any more'. F's Dad is no longer with us. It will eventually become unrepairable so if anyone out there knows of a business making hand driven egg beaters to this design, let us know.
There are cupboards full of other surprising bits of old kit. Some are seldom used but F assures me that each piece does a job that no other bit of kit can replicate and that gives it a 'right to remain'. What surprises me about many of them is the weight. If 'kill a cat' was your measure of mass, our kitchen could kill whole clowders of them.
That's what you get when your grandmothers cooked on coal ranges and you have their recipes and ..... their bits of old kit.
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