Kenwood heaven
If you grew up in Australia or England during the last fifty years, your mother probably owned and used a Kenwood Chef mixer. I remember podding peas with the special pea-hulling attachment when I was a kid. There was an attachment for almost anything.
The Kenwood Chef went on sale in 1950. It was the first home food processor, and was designed to take much of the physical labour out of cooking. Ken Wood had been an RAF engineer: he built the Chef to be a serious piece of machinery. It became an emblem of modernity, one of the original labour-saving devices. It was designed to make cooking faster and easier, to help women get out of the kitchen to pursue their own interests. The Kenwood Chef made the world a palpably better place.
I’d coveted a Kenwood Chef of my own for a long time. I finally got lucky at the Coburg Trash ‘n’ Treasure and picked one up for only fifty bucks. It’s a classic model A701, probably older than I am, and still looks quite new. It’s got the white Pyrex bowl and the K beater, but no other accessories (although they’re easy enough to get on eBay). Next I need to find a mincing attachment: the goal is to try making my own sausages (I live a real wild life).
Kenwood UK offers manuals for its products in PDF format for free download, even for the old Chefs. Which is great: few companies bother providing online information about heritage products (SEGA being another).
The manual for the A701 can be downloaded here. It’s a big file–about 23Mb–but it’s worth the download, even if you don’t own a vintage Chef, because it includes the recipe book that came with the mixer. It’s a good and varied selection of recipes and, given the prominence and popularity of the Kenwood Chef, of considerable historical interest.
Technorati Tags: Australia, cooking, culture, gadget, Kenwood, kitchen, mixer