Chapter XL
on Measures.)
“Oh, for a sharp knife!” A feminine and hopeless cry often ... but the carborundum knife sharpener (30 to 50 cents) would obviate the humiliation and let the lady cut a big swathe with her menfolk--if they found sharp carving knives set before them. There are many types of sharpeners on the market. Some of them, of course, are quite expensive. Buy the best in this case as in every other case. The best is an investment; less than the best is an expenditure.
Nothing can cut down the antagonism between time and service like vegetable slicers. They slice any vegetable and cost about $2.50 up. Do you realize what such a donation could mean? Could any little fluffy-ruffle pincushion mean so much to anybody, be she cook or pauper?
If you want to give something in the realm of a card for Easter, Christmas or New Year, or some trifle in the case of another sort of anniversary, why not send some of the silencers for kitchen chair and table legs at 10 cents a set? Or the permanent gas lighters for 25 cents. They are convenient and amusing.
Owning a rotary fruit parer ($1.50 up) saves energy and caters to your sense of form, as the fruit can be served unangular and with little waste, and besides, the cook’s imperial temper is not stirred.
TABLE BELLS AND GRIDDLES
Table bells of sweet tintinabulation save the nerves. At any rate there is poetry in such a gift, and one can spend from $1.50 to any price at all on these romantic things, as they also come in the precious metals.
There may be many domiologists with doubts about cake, bread and mayonnaise mixers, but if you ever gave any of these articles to a household, you would go down into history as a benefactor. I wonder often why so many of us forget that such gifts are really gold mines.
No one likes to do unnecessary cleaning and scraping of utensils, so the aluminum waffle and griddle are presents of unusual pleasure-giving potentialities. The prices here are prone to fluctuation but there are always sizes to be had around $4.50. The electric ones cost three or four times as much.
If you would give a regal gift to the Monarch of Culinaria, the kitchen cabinet is the thing. It is compact little kitchen “with everything in it but the kitchen stove,” and fills the need of the worker in the badly planned and equipped city kitchen and the unplanned kitchen out of town.
Although not exclusively a kitchen gift, the vacuum cleaner cannot be excelled as a present. Once bestowed you are looked upon as a fairy god-parent. Why not give one for a wedding present sometime? The fireless cookers and refrigerators would come under this classification too, but they vary in price too much to record here.
ELECTRIC DISHWASHERS AND STOVES
If there be a regent and not a cook in your kitchen, she will welcome with tired arms the electric dishwasher, the boon to the woman doing her own work. It costs about $150. or thereabouts and makes housework a game rather than drudgery. Haven’t you often heard the young wife say: “I wouldn’t mind house work at all if it weren’t for the dishwashing.”
Then there is the magic--yes, magic--electric stove family! There isn’t time enough left to tell of some of their wonder workings. If you gave one of these (costing about $180), you would be giving at the same time money, time-to-herself, and the rest cure. Some of these stoves automatically cook and stop their cooking while you are out or sleeping, save money because they make cheap cuts of meat taste like expensive cuts, act as fireless cookers and refrigerators and ... I will leave the rest to your investigation.
Of course, there are the electric laundry appliances, casseroles, ice-cream freezers which must be turned and which must not be turned, convenient egg-heaters, buffers, kitchenette articles, and countless other things in the line of percolators, etc., which are obvious and need no mind-jerking from us.
All these things are gifts of value, tremendous helps to the cook and ought to be boons to the seeker for something to give.
Be elastic! Come out of the parlor and go into the kitchen for a new field of giving.
Gifts raise the value of things and the value of culinary pursuits need raising.
##