It is not, Kay Roesch insists, an extravagance to own an asparagus peeler.
“If you were having Queen Elizabeth over for dinner, you’d want to peel your asparagus,” says Roesch, who makes her living selling kitchen gadgets and geegaws to folks who never met a garlic press or a lemon zester they didn’t like.
And $7.50 is a small price to pay to see to it the queen eats no unpeeled asparagus.
A stroll through the gadget department of a typical kitchen store yields many little objects whose purpose, other than cluttering drawers, can remain fuzzy to the untrained eye.
There are $7 crab forks and $15.50 nutmeg graters. Barbara Keating, another gadget saleswoman, reports she once sold a butter curler ($10.50).
While kitchen appliance manufacturers spend millions coming up with fancy new $50 electric tater twisters and $150 espresso-makers in hopes of capturing the public’s fancy the way bread machines did, little hand-held gadgets don’t get much press.
They’re inexpensive, except for a $60 pair of grape shears, and fun to hold. And it’s fun to try to figure out exactly what some do.
Like the $4.50 butter paddle.
“Oh, that’s to-uh-you use that for-uh-I think you use it to make butter with,” volunteers Todd Whitehead, a salesman at the store.
Whitehead’s boss clarifies the butter paddle issue:
“It’s to make butter balls,” Roesch says.
“You put a lump of butter between two paddles and roll it into a ball. We looked it up.”