Gadgets Are Much More Interesting

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29101, 13 January 1960, Page 2

Gadgets Are Much More Interesting

Christchurch women, it seems, are not too interested in kitchen gadgets. Shop assistants say they tend to buy just the well-known kitchen helps—-egg-beaters, potato-peelers and tin-openers. Yet it is doubtful if these gadgets have ever been more interesting than they are now, and most of them are made in New Zealand.

Tin-openers, bottle-openers and potato-peelers were, not so long ago, almost the only real gadgets on the market. Today, although New Zealand women still have not the almost bewildering confusion of gadgets to be found in America for instance, they do have a fairly wide range.

The kitchen counters are well worth looking over for timesavers and for small presents to amuse friends who seem to have everything else. A Few Shillings

Gadgets usually sell for a few shillings, and among them tinopeners—there is one which fits to the wall —and bottle-openers are always appearing in fresh designs. One bottle-opener merely applies the old principle of giving the screw top a good twist in the door, but saves the door paint. Plastics have probably meant the biggest advances in kitchenware. There are even plastic eggpoachers and kitchen saws, although metal saws that cut through bone, valuable for getting cold joints and rabbits down to stewing sized pieces, are strong and comparatively cheap. One of the newest gadgets is a tomato slicer with wire cutters which do not squeeze the soft centre. The automatic fork, too. appears for a number of uses. It spears and then ejects and is very handy for sticky or wet food, or for reaching into the bottom of jars.

Bean-slicers, biscuit-cutters, doughnut-makers and waffle-cases have many shapes and one peeler has a bean-slicer in the end. But perhaps some of the most interesting of the kitchen gadgets are those evolved on a smaller scale from equipment used in restaurants and shops—the small home version of the chipped potatocutter, which is much quicker than cutting chips for a family by

hand and the ice-cream scoop, once the prerogative of the icecream man, but now available for serving ice-cream or mashed vegetables at home. There’s a potatoe chipper too included in one mill-type grater. Stoning Peaches

Selling well at the moment is a peach pitting spoon, very useful for stoning large quantities of fruit for preserving. There is a corer which take the middle out of an apple very neatly, and a double action peeler which lefthanded as well as right-handed housewives can use. And there is a range of tongs with all kinds of gripping teeth and surfaces for picking food out of deep frying pans, for instance. A Japanese importation is an ice crusher rather like a pair of tongs with squared cutters inside the head. Ice gadgets too include the plastic ice cube tray. Give it a twist and the cubes or balls fall out. In plastic it may not wear as long as the traditional aluminium tray but it saves a lot, of time and temper. Too expensive perhaps for the gadget class—it belongs more to the range of kitchen equipment which includes electric mixers and pressure cookers—is the automatic slicer, a miniature of the grocer's big red machine. It slices bread, bacon, or anything put on to it, and would be a very handy thing for the woman with half a dozen lunches to cut every day.

Among the cleaning gadgets a choice of brushes with special uses is coming on to the market. There is a dustless duster, impregnated with a silicone compound which actually absorbs dust and leaves a light polish on floors and furniture. It can be washed a number of times without affecting the processing.