Saturday, September 20, 2008

Manual Meat Grinder is my New Toy

I found the kitchen tool I've been coveting for years at a yard sale this morning. It’s a manual Enterprise Tinned No. 10 Meat Grinder. You put various meats or even fruit into the top funnel and as you turn the crank a gear inside forces the meat/fruit through the perforated plate. I think the No. 10 refers to the size of the hole in the plate. You can see on the handle it was produced in 1884 in Philadelphia.

I am really excited to make my own hamburger meat, pate and sausages. The only problem is it needs to be refurbished. There are some rust spots and because it is tinned, anywhere there is rust means the tin has been eaten off of the cast iron. Looks like I have a few options including scouring pads, lye and maybe electrolysis. You can read more about why tin is used as a protective coating for the iron here.

I found a good resource at the Wagner and Griswold Society, an online community for cast iron and aluminum cookware collectors. There were a few posts that deal with how to clean up tin coated kitchen tools. The best part was it was only $5, sold to me by a couple who were having a baby and wanted to trade in knickknacks for Playschool. They never used it in the kitchen, it was just hipster object de art for them.

4 comments:

Bev Sykes said...

Gee. I grew up with one of those. My mother used it all the time!

Grace Piper said...

Bev,
What did she use it for? Love to hear stories about these old time tools.

Grace

Anonymous said...

My mother had an old Victoria brand strainer. We never used it for meat but every year at canning season we would get it out and use it for everything - juicing fruit, straining squash, pureeing tomatoes, etc. It was a big mess and I am glad we can do that with food processors now. Many thanks to Ron Popeil or whoever it was that made the first cheap food processors.

Anonymous said...

A few weeks ago during our honeymoon week in Cape Cod, I had a parpadelle bolognese made with ground tuna at a place called Blackfish in Truro - it was insanely good, and the texture was very beef-like.... so make sure to try grinding up tuna!