Once-Popular Kitchen Tools People Stopped Using

For many a child, mom's (or grandma's) egg beaters were a tempting toy to play with — but also an incredibly easy way to pinch tiny fingers. This hand-cranked device, also known as a hand mixer or rotary egg beater, was initially designed for mixing together a variety of wet and dry ingredients. A typical egg beater consists of a handle attached to a gear mechanism that rotates one or more beaters or whisk attachments. Inventor Willis Johnson of Cincinnati, Ohio patented the first ever variation of egg beater (which he built by hand) in the early part of 1884. His device even contained two different chambers for mixing — when one side was dirty, you had another side you could use.

As the mixer Willis created gained popularity, and other versions joined the market, home cooks began to use these beaters primarily for beating eggs. They were ideal for introducing air and fluffy lightness into eggs you might use to scramble or make an omelet. Still, egg beaters also provided a faster and more thorough alternative to hand-mixing cake batter, creamy sauces, and even making homemade whipped cream.

But as popular as egg beaters were for a time, electricity was ultimately their downfall. Electric mixers started their decline in popularity. And as more and more homes got blenders, food processors, and even stand mixers, there were too many other easy and more convenient options out there for the egg beater to survive. It had finally outlived its usefulness.

From brownies to banana bread and even pecan pie (yes, even those made with bourbon), chopped nuts are an essential part of so many different baked goods and savory dishes alike. But imagine the problem home cooks had chopping a cup of walnuts or peanuts in an era before food processors and blenders existed. Talk about tedious — and risky for the safety of your fingertips.

To solve this problem, and make chopping nuts quicker and easier, some crafty inventors (whose identities have been lost to the annals of history) created what we know as the manual nut grinder or nut mill. These devices first gained widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were typically hand-cranked and featured a hopper or compartment on top of a glass jar. Cooks could add the nuts they wanted to chop to the hopper and then turn a tiny handle, which rotated a set of "teeth" at the bottom of the container and crushed the nuts into smaller pieces that were then ideal for cooking and baking with.

Flash forward a few decades, and with the advent of electric kitchen appliances, manual nut grinders became less of a necessity for cooking. Although they worked, they were much less effective and still relatively time-consuming and tedious to use. And so, they went away. Today, you can find vintage versions for sale on many different websites, but they're there more as a decorative curiosity than as a functional kitchen tool.

Whether it's extra-crispy chocolate chip potato chip cookies or salted triple chocolate brownie batter cookies, everybody loves breaking into a big, moist, chewy, homemade cookie. But our modern rustic, hand-formed cookies weren't always the norm. Once upon a time (in that magical era of the 1950s through the 1970s), most home bakers instead liked their cookies to be neat, uniform, and perfectly alike — like they're just rolled off the factory floor.

The cookie press, or cookie gun as it was sometimes known, was created to achieve this look and help bakers quickly and easily create perfectly shaped, symmetrical, uniform cookies. Dough was pressed through a cylindrical barrel with a plunger or trigger mechanism and out one of several different interchangeable discs or nozzles at the end of the device, creating the cookie's perfect shape. You could make stars, hearts, flowers, and all sorts of holiday-themed designs.

But as slick as their operation was, cookie presses were also far from perfect. Some variations were incredibly difficult to operate. Most were a pain to clean and required tedious disassembly and hand-washing. And perhaps worst of all, in our more recent era of expanding tastes and flavors, cookie presses didn't actually work with every type of cookie dough. Although you can still find them in some kitchens today — they are still very effective with spritz and sugar-cookie style doughs in particular — most home bakers have given up "the gun" entirely.

With bagels firmly entrenched in our modern daily life — on the menu at almost every breakfast hot spot and available at nearly every grocery store — it might seem hard to believe that a little over a generation ago, they were barely known to much of the U.S. But a lot can obviously change in just a few decades. Once a "niche" ethnic food, by the late '80s and early '90s, mainstream America had fallen in love with this doughy breakfast treat. Yet there was a problem. Most bagels for sale at that time didn't come pre-sliced. That obviously made mornings more time-consuming and messy. It also opened people up to injury, as many people would sometimes accidentally slice their hands open while attempting to cut their bagels in half. Seriously.

The guillotine bagel slicer was created to eliminate this problem. The device featured a blade mounted on a platform with a hinged arm. Drop your bagel in the center, press down, and you can quickly and easily slice through it with a swift, "guillotine-like" motion. Goodbye accidental cuts, hello perfectly sliced bagel halves.

But over the years, as apparently happens to guillotines of all types, that sliding blade fell out of favor. Bakers started pre-slicing their bagels before sale. And, we simply grew a bit more savvy and knowledgeable about how to slice bagels open the traditional way, safely with a knife.

There's an art to making a great poached egg, and there are a lot of different things you need to consider in order to do it well. Because poaching eggs is so tricky, home cooks have searched for years for ways to make the process easier. Enter the egg coddler.

Created in Europe in the late 19th century, the egg coddler was meant to be a quicker and easier way to create the same soft, creamy-textured eggs you get from poaching. The earliest versions of the tool consisted of a porcelain or ceramic container that was just large enough to hold an egg, along with a lid that could be placed on top. To prepare your "coddled" egg, an egg was cracked into the coddler, seasoning was added, and the lid of the pot was placed on top. Then, the whole tool was placed into a shallow pot of simmering water where the eggs could be delicately steamed to just the right consistency.

Although they worked wonderfully, coddlers were still reasonably labor-intensive and tricky to use, and they gradually fell out of popularity in the latter half of the 20th century. Other kitchen tools were able to help home cooks prepare eggs in similar ways more quickly and easily. Plus, formal sit-down family breakfasts became less common, so (sadly) the unveiling of a perfectly cooked, beautiful coddled egg in its own tiny painted pot was no longer as impressive to diners as it once had been.

Finally, when it comes to once-popular kitchen tools people today have virtually stopped using, no list would be complete without the very retro hand-crank ice cream maker. Consisting of an interior metal canister surrounded by a larger, exterior wooden barrel, these impressive machines brought the production of homemade ice cream to the masses. No longer did you have to buy ice cream from a market or restaurant — you could make it at home, in whatever flavors you or your family wanted.

To produce ice cream in a hand-crank machine, a mixture of cream, sugar, and flavoring was poured directly into the ice cream maker's center canister. Then, you'd add a paddle to the middle of that canister — one which was also attached to that outer hand crank. As the handle turned, the paddle rotated, exposing the ice cream mixture to the outer walls of the container, and helping it to freeze. The ice cream maker was made extra cold by a mixture of ice plus salt which was dumped into that outer barrel, a combination which helped ice cream to freeze even faster, without forming ice crystals.

While hand-crank ice cream makers definitely have a nostalgic charm, like so many inventions on our list, modern advances did them in. Electric machines are simply more efficient and easier to operate. Unless, of course, you're off the grid and living somewhere deep in the woods without electricity. In that case, this hand-cranked wonder couldn't be more essential.