Green handles

Two of my favorite things come together in the kitchen. I love to cook in my 1920's farmhouse. The kitchen is a big open room, with one brick wall and a big oak library table in the middle, and an 1860s sideboard and 1940s jelly cupboard to provide extra storage. It's not a modern, glitzy kitchen with granite countertops and maple cabinets. But it works, and it's mine.

My antique house led me to another passion: collecting old kitchen utensils and tools. Because I have a thing about not owning anything I can't use, I've test-driven all of them. In the process, I discovered that many of these 1930s-1940s utensils work circles around their modern counterparts.

I got a rolling pin as a wedding shower gift. No matter how much I dusted it with flour, my pie dough always stuck. Years later, I got a marble rolling pin for Christmas. Same story. The weight was nice for pastry, but everything stuck to it. This beautiful 1940s green-handled rolling pin cost a couple of bucks, and nothing sticks to the hard maple roller. I like it so much, I bought another one for the cabin, and a red-handled one just for fun.





I rarely need a sifter, but when I do, this is the one I choose. It has two pieces: the bowl where you put the flour, and a wire handle that ends in a loop of wire next to the screen of the bowl. All you have to do is grab the handle and shake the bowl back and forth, and the wire loop sifts the flour for you.







This little jar opener is probably my favorite kitchen utensil. Always on the lookout for green-handled kitchen stuff, Dave bought this for me. It was one of many "I've never seen one of these before" finds. This little guy is called the 'Top-Off,' and I've never found the bottle cap or jar top it can't remove with little effort. If you're tired of handing a jar to someone else to open, you need one of these.






Some kitchen tools go out of style (when was the last time you julienned carrots?). Some justifiably get replaced by a better model. But time and time again, I find something my basket of 60-year-old tools that will never lose its place in my kitchen. Sometimes, older is better.