“EVERYTHING BECAME MORE REFINED BY USING TOOLS”: A CONVERSATION WITH CORINNE MYNATT
Corinne Mynatt
Corinne Mynatt is a design curator and writer who is currently working on a book about kitchen tools from around the world. She was born in Nashville and studied fine art at the Pratt Institute in New York and Central Saint Martin’s in London, before getting a Master’s degree at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Her book will be released in autumn 2021 through Hardie Grant Books.
How did this project come about? Has food always been an interest of yours, and how did you decide to look into the design aspect of cooking?
I have been interested in food ever since I was a teenager, but when I moved to New York at eighteen years old, I began to experiment and learn more about different cuisines and cultures. Going to the supermarkets in Chinatown and seeing all these ingredients I had never heard of was a whole new world opened up to me. So I really got into food at that point.
Until about a year and a half ago, I worked for a design curator and consultant who had a very clear focus and research topic. People always come to her about this specialism — even though she has a very small studio. I realised that this was quite a good way to run your career, so when I quit, I began thinking about what my thing could be, what I really loved and enjoyed. That’s where the food and design interests came together. Over the years I had found different kitchen tools at flea markets that fascinated me, that contained these histories within them. I must say I just generally have a fascination with strange objects: obscure looking things that have been designed and put into this world. I figured it would be interesting to have a sort of survey of the design of kitchen tools, and couldn’t find anything that matched what I thought I could produce… So I decided to write it myself.
How do you go about finding and collecting these items? Are they things you randomly stumble upon at flea markets, or do you specifically seek things out?
A Holzstampfer
It’s a combination of both. Last year when I was at a flea market in Berlin, I found a couple of strange objects. I didn’t know what they were, so I asked people on Instagram. I love that: to see things out of their context, when they’re just a lost object with an undefined purpose. One thing I found were these Holzstampfer, they’re wooden mashers that are just so beautiful. The principle is always the same — a wooden handle and carved wooden shape at the end — but they come in endless forms depending on the maker turning them on a lathe. They can mash, tamp pastry into a tin, or push sauerkraut into a fermentation jar — but they could just as well be a weapon.
I would always look out for things wherever I went. Right before I went on a trip to Tokyo in the autumn of 2018, I started looking at books and finding all these objects that I had never seen before, especially from different cultures. That’s when the project started to take shape.
Are there any difficulties in finding and understanding objects from cultures that are not your own?
Absolutely. It’s much harder. One thing, of course, is language, which creates difficulties when researching. I’m supposed to travel to Japan soon as part of the research for the book, but also to expand the project further and make a pilot for a television series. This amazing Japanese chef is coming with us, and last Sunday we met up in London. She had all these amazing objects in her house, a lot of which I had seen in pictures, but these personal experiences with people are very valuable. I try to do a lot of the research for the book in that way, to meet people, cook with them, learn from them and share that knowledge further. That makes it very exciting. But a lot of the information of course also comes from existing books; I spend a lot of time at the British Library. There are some amazing references out there, like the ‘James Beard International Cook’s Catalogue’, which has tools from around the world in it and has been really useful. There are also a lot of mad books, like these collector’s guides for which people collected thousands of items. And some are just very beautiful, like a book called ‘Glassware of the Depression Era’.
What is your aim for the book? Is it supposed to become a kind of encyclopedia?
Well, no. The idea of gathering all the kitchen tools in the world would obviously be too overwhelming. There are also budget issues in doing that! When I first pitched the idea for the project, I was aiming for 400 to 450 objects, now it will be around 250. I have certain parameters. The angle is not to create a list of must-haves to become a great chef, it’s really about the design aspect of the tools. For example, after the Second World War, a lot of aluminium objects began to appear in the West. During the war, people hadn’t been able to use aluminium, because it was needed for the war effort. And suddenly post-war you see all these crazy-shaped aluminium orange juicers and garlic presses — so these objects have design history within them. It’s not just about some iconic designers, but also about materials and why certain objects looked a certain way or were needed in a certain time. So that interesting design history is one of the criteria, then there are the objects that strike me as strange and fascinating, and lastly, there is the culture they come from.
“I generally have a fascination with strange objects: obscure looking things that have been designed and put into this world.”
It’s been interesting to find that there are so many similarities between kitchen tools used around the world. A mortar and pestle pretty much appears in every culture and has been around for thousands of years. In Japan they have the suribachi, which has grooves in the mortar, and a pestle made out of pepperwood that’s made to grind on that surface but also imparts flavour to food. In some African countries, you find these huge mortars and pestles made of wood that you use standing up. So there are similarities and also differences. The same goes for graters. In Asia, there’s a need to grate ginger and daikon radishes, which traditionally didn’t exist in the West. Here, however, there’s a need for grating things like hard cheeses — so they require different kinds of graters, but still, they’re both graters yet made and used differently.
Do you think that with globalisation these differences are getting smaller? Does a food processor ultimately work both for grating ginger and hard cheeses?
It’s interesting you ask that. There’s definitely a transference now of objects and cooking techniques. For example, you see Eastern cultures making versions of Western tools and Western cultures making versions of Eastern tools. To give an example, on Sunday at this chef’s house, she showed me this beautiful thick aluminium pot made in Hiroshima. It was exactly the shape of a doufeu which is like a Dutch oven. You can turn the lid over when you’re cooking something in it and then fill it with water or ice, which keeps everything moist through condensation. This Japanese pot looked exactly the same as the French pot. She said that in Japan, it is used for dry cooking, like to bake potatoes in. Turns out that a Japanese company started producing these pots in the fifties. They entered the Japanese cooking tradition, where their purpose was adapted.
That’s so interesting. How do you plan to order the objects in the book, so that all these connections become apparent?
They are divided by process, so they kind of follow the steps of cooking a meal. The chapters will be Store & Contain, Measure & Weigh, Prep & Wash, Cut & Chop, Grind & Grate, Mix & Stir, Compress & Form, Heat & Transform, Hold & Scoop and Clean.
What’s your favourite tool you have discovered during your research?
A tool called a presse-ail et dénoyauteur in French, so a garlic press and pitter. I bought one fifteen years or so ago. It’s a garlic press, but also a nutcracker, you can pit cherries or olives with it, use it to scale fish and I’ve seen some that also have a bottle opener at one end. When I first bought this thing I thought it was so amazing, you can sort of feel the French, nineteen-sixties futuristic optimism. For me, this object in a way was the first inspiration. I had it in the back of my mind for years and years and it still is one of my favourites.
It’s kind of an anomaly for the book though, because I’m not going to include a lot of gadgets or kitschy things. They’re often annoying and not very interesting in the end. But some combination tools can be quite fascinating. I also found this strange thing called a ‘universal tool’ from the nineteenth century that was a combination of a meat tenderiser and potholder, but could also be used to take a hot pie plate from the oven. Things like that are fun.
A presse-ail et dénoyauteur
A ‘universal tool’
Cassava squeezers
Do you have a favourite time period for kitchen tools?
After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, so in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the world was changing fast and people invented loads of mad stuff. Tons of apple peelers were invented, endless versions of the thing. Of course this burst of creativity wasn’t limited to the kitchen. But really, most of the things in the book actually were created in the last 200 years. Before that, everything was super basic.
You write on your website that you’re not only interested in the ways tools change the way we eat, but also what we eat. Can you give an example of something that would be inedible or just impossible to eat without a certain tool?
Yes, there is this amazing object from South America, a cassava squeezer. There are two kinds of cassavas, the bitter one has poison inside, which you need to extract in order to eat it. This is now done industrially, but in order to do it by hand, people created these beautiful baskets. You put grated cassava in and hang it up, the poison then drips out of the bottom, and after that, you can process and eat it. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful object.
More generally speaking, everything just got a lot more refined by using tools. A lot of that also goes into the presentation — but that will be my volume two, I hope.
Interview: Yannic Moeken
Copy Editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photos: Corinne Mynatt
Illustration: Junshen Wu
