14 Forgotten Vintage Kitchen Gadgets from the Past

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It’s a scientifically proven fact (maybe): kitchen gadgets are fun. That’s true whether you’re shopping for some adorably quirky kitchen tools that actually work, or if you’re taking advice from the pros on some high-end kitchen equipment that will make a home chef’s life easier. Kitchen gadgets are far from a new idea, though, and there’s something undeniably charming about imagining a Colonial-era cook getting super excited to try the newest invention that promises to make meal prep easier.

Some of the pieces of nifty kitchen equipment we still use today have been around for a surprisingly long time. Juicers, for example, were invented way back in the 1930s, with home juicers becoming popular in the 1950s. Who knew? Not every gadget has had that kind of enduring popularity, though, and we’re here to talk about some of the ones that no one uses or even remembers anymore.

These are the things that you might stumble across at a yard sale or estate sale and wonder just what the heck they’re used for. And honestly, some look like their inventors took some serious inspiration from medieval torture devices, or perhaps just had some issues that they probably needed to work through. Some of these, we would even argue, deserve to make a comeback.

Also called corers, these mid-19th-century machines are a definite entry in the game of “is it a kitchen gadget or is it a medieval torture device,” and they’re pretty heavy-duty contraptions. There were a few different designs that ended up being commercially successful, and the idea is as straightforward as it is genius. The apple is secured on a spike, which both turns and moves forward in a motion that carries the apple past the peeling blade. 

Different machines were made to peel and/or core the apples, and some designs were specifically used for irregularly formed fruits. Anyone who loves making their own spiced applesauce or Dutch apple pie knows what a pain peeling apples by hand can be, and we’re surprised how rare they are in modern kitchens.

Apple peelers were a huge deal, mostly because of the sheer volume of apples that were processed by hand each and every autumn. If you’re wondering just how many different ways there are to build an apple peeler, there are at least 250 different patents for them. Many were made from cast iron, and that means there are a lot of them that are still around today.

Bakers know that there are a lot of hacks to help expedite the Christmas cookie-making process, and one of our favorites includes a nifty kitchen gadget that’s mostly — but not entirely — forgotten. Cookie presses (or cookie guns) were particularly popular in the 1950s and 60s and were essentially tubes that you filled with your dough, then squeezed out through patterned tips to make cookies quickly. Wear Ever was one popular brand, and given that these were typically used once a year around the holidays, it’s not unheard of for full sets to pop up in garage and estate sales, and in online auctions.

Cookie presses were commonly used to make a particular type of cookie called a spritz, and if you know anyone who traces their family or holiday traditions back to northern Europe, you’ve probably had these cookies. They resemble a simple and straightforward shortbread cookie, but they’re a little different.

The dough is almost the same, but you can’t use just any dough with a press, or it’s not going to bake into the shape you’re going for. If that sounds like fun, there’s good news. This particular gadget is often overlooked, but you can pick up a modern and highly-rated OXO cookie press set on Amazon for around $25.

Imagine it’s 1950, the war is over, families are settling down in their suburban homes, and women are back out of the workforce and into the kitchen. When it’s their turn to host friends, neighbors, or spouse’s boss, the event would undoubtedly involve cocktails, and truly stellar hostesses would be making those cocktails with the help of hand-cranked ice crushers. Many of these ice crushers had different settings for crushing different types of ice, and designs that reflected the aesthetic of the decade.

Although these gadgets hit their heyday when they became an invaluable part of home cocktail parties, they were first patented in 1880. Early machines were cast-iron monstrosities that stood on the floor or tabletops, and they were made to be showpieces for the super-rich. This was a time, after all, when ice was an expensive luxury, and it wasn’t until World War I that ordinary people could afford to have ice delivered. Affordable ice crushers started appearing at the end of the 1930s and were wildly popular until other gadgets, like blenders, rendered them obsolete.

If you’re whipping up some soft, fluffy scrambled eggs these days, you might just use a fork, a whisk, or a blender. Go back a handful of decades, though, and you’d probably find a rotary egg beater in most kitchens. Popularized in the 1870s and 1880s, it was a pretty nifty idea that used a series of gears attached to a hand crank. A little bit of effort was exerted to spin the crank, which was transferred through the gears, magnified, and spun the beaters. 

It was a huge deal, and let’s take meringue as an example. That sweet treat was first created in 1720, and if you wanted to make some, you had to plan on whipping the egg whites and sugar for about an hour and a half to get them to the proper consistency. A rotary egg beater was so efficient that it dropped to five minutes. 

There is a wide variety of designs, with some even being seated in the center of a lid that could be attached to a custom glass bowl. They’ve mostly been replaced by electric blenders, but you can still buy them. Options like this Prepworks by Progressive egg beater are on sale at Amazon for around $17. They’re still useful for tasks like whipping up homemade latte recipes (they’re great for frothing milk).

We’re a little bummed that metal grocery lists fell out of fashion, because they’re brilliant, palm-sized little tools that are infinitely reusable, and that make us feel a little bit like we’re living in the 1950s (excuse us while we put on our pearls).

They’re basically a piece of metal inscribed with a grocery list, and little notches that you flip to keep track of what you need and even what you’d put in the shopping cart. There’s not too much that’s been written about the history of these nifty little gadgets, and that’s likely because they were so commonly used that no one really gave them much thought.

We do understand why they’re not popular anymore, especially with the advent of the kind of smart technology that connects even our phones to our fridges. These lists seem to have disappeared long before we had phones that could double as shopping lists, and we’d hazard a guess that metal shopping lists fell out of favor, possibly because there were simply more grocery options out there, and they just weren’t as useful anymore.

There’s something oddly entertaining about the infomercial, and if you say you don’t love seeing people being baffled by their complete failure at completing very simple tasks, we say you’re fibbing. Back in 1956, an infomercial (preserved on TikTok) proclaimed the Chop-O-Matic “the greatest kitchen appliance ever made,” and wow-ee gosh, that’s something to live up to. That pitchman was Ron Popeil, and he spent his career selling customers products like the Chop-O-Matic, the related Veg-O-Matic (pictured), and other gadgets like hair in a spray can. Hilarious overselling aside, everything but the hair is still a neat idea.

The Chop-O-Matic is basically a dome with movable blades mounted inside. So, when you put it over food and push the handle down a few times, your rough chopping is done. The Veg-O-Matic was similarly designed to make chopping food easier, and in this case, you could press (for example) potatoes through an adjustable metal grate for perfectly even fries. 

We could say that everyone had one of these things, but that urge might only come from the fact that the aforementioned commercial is now burned into people’s brain. We can say, though, that when Popeil died in 2021, he left behind a $200-million fortune.

While researching this article, we found a few gadgets that we think would still be useful today, and a few that would be great in a vintage kitchen just because they look cool. Then, we got to The Hot Dogger and thought, “Well, that’s a dumb idea that someone’s younger sibling was definitely electrocuted with.”

The Hot Dogger was a bizarre thing made by Presto in the 1970s, and when we say this thing breaks about a dozen rules of health, safety, and common sense, we’re not exaggerating. To use this weird little thing, you’d open the lid and spike each end of the hot dog on very, very sharp electrodes, which would then cook the dog in a way that gives us flashbacks to “The Green Mile.” Take a look at one of these things in action, and you’ll see a lot of smoke, more sparks than you might be comfortable seeing in your kitchen, and as if that wasn’t odd enough, there’s no timer. How do you know when they’re done? Eh — minor details, but vintage ads suggest that it was somewhere around a minute to electrocute your hot dog into submission. 

Redditors who have tried these report that the dogs cooked by this thing tasted like smoke, lightning, and burning. Do we even need to explain why these are no longer a thing? Do we want one to experiment with? … Yes. 

For anyone who loves a soft-boiled egg but can never remember the guidelines about the precise way to boil eggs, an egg coddler might be the kitchen gadget you need. It’s possible that you may have seen one at a garage or estate sale and not even realized what they were for, because at a glance, they can look like fancy little porcelain cups with lids … and they are. It’s thought they date back to the late 1800s, and by the early 20th century, they were wildly popular. The idea is that you crack an egg inside, then set the coddler in a pan with a small amount of water. The water boils, the egg cooks, and there’s no worry about broken shells and watery, eggy bits. 

Coddled eggs are a little different from poached eggs, but that’s mainly due to a different cooking method, and in some cases, you might find entire sets with multiple coddlers and a shared heating base. 

If that all sounds fancy, they were. Many were ornately decorated porcelain or silver and were the kind of thing you’d see on royal dining tables or in “The Great Gatsby.” By the mid-20th century, egg coddlers had become more commonplace and were usually made of glass.

The Foley Manufacturing Company made all kinds of kitchenware, including flour sifters and utensils. Products were known as being incredibly durable and very good at doing what they were made to do, and it turns out that they had something of a cult following. These are the kind of things that get passed down from parents to children, and let’s talk about the Foley Fork.

It’s not something you’d use for eating dinner with, and if you can imagine taking a tool that’s the shape of a flat spatula and replacing the flat with six fork tines, you’re on the right track. Julia Child was a fan, and no, they’re not made anymore. There are replicas, but enthusiasts say the originals outperform modern versions. It’s shockingly versatile, with Redditors sharing that they use theirs for mashing potatoes and avocados, mixing biscuits, folding butter into dough, and they’re precisely the right size for pressing lines onto the top of classic peanut butter cookies.

Fun fact: Ina Garten prefers a specific size of egg for use when she’s baking. Different sizes of eggs do have different uses though, and we live in a wonderful world where we know what we’re buying because the carton says it. It wasn’t always that way, though, and retailers bought eggs directly from farmers who would use egg scales to weigh them for several reasons. Similarly sized eggs were sold together for a weight-based price, and some eggs were better for hatching. 

By the time World War II came around, more people were turning to raising their own chickens. Egg scales ended up being a common household item, letting farmers and cooks alike know exactly how heavy eggs were and which ones, if any, were suitable for selling. There’s a variety of vintage egg scales floating around, with many made from companies like Jiffy Way and Acme. You can pick up retro egg scales like this Jiffy-Way egg grading scale on Amazon, but if you see a vintage one out in the wild, do your research and consider picking one up, there’s even a collector’s market out there for them.

Few fruits are as annoying as cherries. While undeniably tasty, if you have to sit and remove the pits for cherry pie filling, it’s going to get really old really quickly. While there are handheld cherry pitters — like this Ordekcity cherry corer — available on Amazon, that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about massive, cast-iron cherry pitters that attach to your table, and the vintage cherry pitters were no joke. They typically worked by puncturing the cherry with sharp iron spikes, then pushing the pits out of the holes. It’s generally not pretty, but that doesn’t matter for something like pie. 

There’s a pretty wide range of designs for these cherry stoners, with many dating back from the turn of the century to around World War I. Some used a plunger mechanism to push out the pits, while others had a rotary hand crank. Some were even so big that they stood on the floor, and these heavy-duty machines were clearly for people who were serious about their cherries.

In addition to making the fork that has countless dedicated fans, Foley Manufacturing also made another long-forgotten kitchen gadget: The food mill. It’s perhaps easiest to describe this gadget’s function with an example.

Say you’re making applesauce; perhaps with those apples you peeled with your old-timey apple peeler? Imagine holding a medium-sized pot. Now, imagine it has the same kind of bottom as you might find in a sieve or colander. Above that is a paddle, and that paddle is turned by a hand crank. Throw the apples in, turn the crank, and the paddles push the apples through the grate for perfectly textured mashed apples. 

They were also pretty brilliant for mashed potatoes, they’d make strawberry jam a breeze, and many who still use these vintage gadgets note that they’re perfect for making tomato sauce from scratch. They’re also highly praised for soup, because the texture of anything that’s put through one of these 1920s-era gadgets retains more texture than modern appliances provide. Sure, they’re a little more work, which is why so many of us have probably replaced them, but the final product might just be worth it.

Butter, of course, comes from cream, and yes, you can definitely make your own at home in just around half an hour. That used to be the normal way of making butter, and here’s where butter molds come in. The idea is that you put your homemade butter into the mold and then press the contents down with a lid. Because people have always liked pretty things, the lids were often carved to leave prints in the butter, and interestingly, it’s a process that dates back to the 15th century. 

Butter molds really got popular in the 18th century, and there are a number of different types. Some come apart in two pieces, some are simple stamps, and when it comes time to talk about decorations, they were carved with everything from names to flowers and animals. There’s a good chance you’ll see them now being used as decor pieces in retro-styled country kitchens, and it’s another thing that if you happen to see one at an estate sale, you might want to grab it.

Fans of period dramas on the scale of those akin to “Downton Abbey” might be familiar with these, because they’re a nifty way to take something as everyday as toast and make it feel … dare we say, upper crust? Toast racks are exactly that — racks that hold slices of toast — and they were actually pretty practical. Filling a toast rack meant that you didn’t need to put out toast on plates for individual diners, and it also prevented toast from getting soggy as it sat. Most were made with a base to catch the crumbs, so it wasn’t all about the showmanship. 

They were invented in the late 1700s, were popular in Victorian England, and were often incredibly elaborate. Browse some antique sites, and you can find real ones from the 1800s selling for thousands of dollars, and we’re talking about incredibly ornate, sterling silver toast racks. Don’t have that kind of spare cash, but still like crispy toast? You can get a Muldale English-style toast rack on Amazon for around $20.