Antique kitchen and household tools have a style to them. The tools I use today in my own kitchen are pretty simple and utilitarian, and no one would mistake their design for art. They were made to be used, not admired.
Flipping through an 1890s product catalog at auction recently, I saw how mundane our modern tools are. They are more efficient but that’s about all.
The nifty-looking household and farm products in the catalog at auction were being sold by several companies. The one that first made me do more than just glance was a drawing of the handle for a screw driver and other similar tools. The details were so intricate that I figured each handle must have been made by hand, which they probably weren’t. It was like looking at a work of art.
I was so taken by that handle that I decided to continue looking through the catalog to see what other beautiful objects the industrial designers had created. Not all of the others were as fancy, but their designs were both interesting and telling. I’d seen similar items – such as an apple corer and cherry pit remover – a few years ago at another auction house. They had been part of a collection or left over from an antiques store that had been shuttered.
They were all cast iron and unbearably heavy, but back then this equipment helped to make chores a bit easier. Some of them are no longer in use, their purposes supplanted by other tools that were even more efficient.
What I like about these antique tools is what they tell us about the lives of the people who used them. They give us a peephole into how people lived, what they (and manufacturers) considered important, and even the foods they ate and processed on their own.
Here’s some of what I found. What do you think?
