Kitchen Utensils & My Trip to the Smith McDowell House

For Christmas this year I was given a Master Class . It’s an online school very well produced and thought out. There are a number of great teachers and a wide range of classes from cooking to sports, architecture and design to fashion and literature. I really urge you to take a look at it. There are some amazing things on offer.

My interests being such as they are I decided to take the Technique Class with Thomas Keller.

He starts at the very beginning with the most basic tools of the trade. You might think this would be too basic but so far in every lesson there has been something new for me. The second lesson encompassed “essential tools”. After the big ticket items like knives and cookware –not to be referred to as pots and pans– Chef Keller took on all the other paraphernalia which fills the drawers of our kitchen. He tossed into the sink behind him multiple designs of vegetable peelers, egg slicers, pasta spoons, strawberry hullers, and “useless pieces of plastic” leaving behind a small number (9 at my count*) of multipurpose tools. It was so inspiring, I almost flew to my junk drawer where I was confronted with a number of things I really didn’t want to get rid of. So I decided to put that off.

It was a dreary, rainy, cold February/Saturday so instead I decided to visit one of the other historic homes here in Asheville. Believe it or not, there is more to visit along that line here than just the Biltmore and the Thomas Wolfe House.

The Smith-McDowell House was built in 1840. It remained a single family home throughout the Civil War up to 1957 when it became a Catholic Boy’s School. In 1974 the Western North Carolina Historical Association took it over and restored the home, furnishing the rooms in the style of the periods between 1840-1900.

Winter in Asheville is slow and this winter in particular the cold and storms have kept tourists away and locals in their homes. I was the only visitor that Saturday morning so I scored a private tour with Kay, a lovely woman who was happy to impart as much information (and perhaps a little more) as I wished to hear.

The first room we visited was the kitchen, which was outfitted as it would have been in 1840. There was the usual big fireplace and the table groaning with displays of plastic food and wooden bowls and plates. But, among the obligatory kettles and pots were a number of items I had never seen before: kitchen utensils right out of Thomas Keller’s junk drawer! As specialized in use as any banana slicer or talking remote meat thermometer.

Can you guess what this is?

It’s a sausage stuffer. Sausage in one end, casing on the other, push the meat through with the lever and voila! Sausage.

This next one is something I could actually see using.

If you have ever tried to make a cherry pie with fresh cherries you will know why. It’s a cherry pitter. I have spent hours pitting cherries by hand or with a small hand-held device which pits one cherry at a time. This looks worth having in any kitchen with a cherry tree in the garden.

Aside from kitchen gadgets, there are lots of items which are a little more unusual than the typical historic home display.

Here is a lady’s dressing table from the Victorian era. At the top of the picture there is a small silver dish with a hole in the top. This was for saving hair collected from a hairbrush. Hair was often used to stuff small pillows, used to recreate a “rat” to give height to a hair style and even woven into brooches.

And this is a bullet, called a Minie Ball, developed during the Civil War. My guide loved the fact that it was called a “ball” when it was shaped as a bullet and that the “bullets” in use before that were actually balls.

If you go:

The Smith McDowell House is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10AM-4PM Check the website for special events and exhibits. A favorite with visitors is the Victorian Christmas Display mid-November to Mid-January.