Saturday Thoughts...Small Appliances We Don't Have Anymore

Myrna and I were still talking about electric kitchen gadgets and machines we used to have that we don’t anymore.

Do you remember these stylish electric coffee percolators?  The Sunbeam Coffeemaster vacuum pot?   

Those polypropylene ones?  In those 60's and 70's colors?

Electric percolators were popular from the 30's to the 70's when Mr. Coffee came out with the first successful electric drip coffee maker in 1972.  I was a quick convert, as our Norwegian father insisted that drip coffee was the only kind worth drinking, and we used a pour-over style drip pot for years.

Before that I actually had one of the poly coffee pots in avocado green- my sister-in-law Bonnie said she had a yellow one; they stained terribly, and didn't last long.  Myrna had some of the Corning Ware coffee pots.

Our parents and grandparents never had electric coffee pots, and in fact, I never had one until I married.  But they never missed coffee time at 9 am and 3pm.

I first bought a blender when we lived in Germany, from the PX, that we used for drinks for our card parties.  In 1933 the Waring blender was created. Fred Waring had a band, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, and he financed the blender and advertised it while on the road with his band.  Other popular brands were Hamilton Beach and Osterizer.  I couldn’t afford a Waring blender and had an Osterizer for several years.  After food processors came out and were widely available, the blender had to go.  It really only worked well for drinks; to chop vegetables, for instance, you had to use water and then drain them, not necessary in a food processor.  I could do so much more with a food processor it wasn’t a hard choice.

The one-stop machine for baking bread was first introduced in Japan, in 1986, by Matsushita Electric, now Panasonic. The machine's popularity spread, making its way into American kitchens throughout the '90s.  As a bread maker, I finally bought an expensive Zojirushi, because King Arthur was touting them.  It did a good job of making dough, baked bread not so much, and I found that my Kitchenaid made good dough much faster and did a lot of other things well too and I simply didn’t have the room for both.  Myrna had a bread machine that she used much more than I did, but that finally went by the wayside too.

It’s interesting how I have gone back to more manual things in the kitchen, not deliberately, but because they don’t take much room and are easy to use…like a hand can opener and manual coffee grinder and an egg beater for instance.