Last updated 09:00, Saturday, 08 November 2008

Timeline recently featured appliances that had lasted for years but you’ll be amazed at the number of common items we used to have in the kitchen 30 or 40 years ago which have vanished completely as we get hooked on labour-saving devices.

Missed: A teapot and cosy and pressure cooker

Let’s start with the good old-chip pan – now replaced by deep fat fryers, although if you’re into healthy eating you won’t have one of those either.

Soda streams, popular in the mid 70s, promised you fizzy drinks at your fingertips, but somehow they never quite tasted like the real thing did they? Electric carving knives – a must at Christmas to carve the turkey, although it was not something I mastered particularly well!

A pressure cooker – a great labour-saving device they said. I had one of those too but was terrified to use it in case it exploded.

A teapot and cosy – rarely seen nowadays – we’d rather pop a tea bag into a mug than brew in a pot. Talking of which everyone had a mug tree (with matching mugs, of course) and of course is there any use for a tea strainer anymore?

Hand-held whisks were hard work and today have been replaced by hand-held blenders to make fruit smoothies.

I loved the toastie maker but if you managed to make one without being burned by molten cheese, you were lucky.

Of course the height of sophistication was to have a spice rack, stocked with every kind of herb which we couldn’t pronounce and nine times out of 10, didn’t use.

I remember getting 14 casserole dishes for wedding presents when I got married – I can’t remember how many of them I actually used but does their disappearance in this modern world mean we no longer cook from scratch? It looks that way.

And how about other gadgets like shaped jelly moulds, egg slicers, lollymakers and of course, good old Tupperware. Does anyone still have parties?

So would we like to swap our microwaves, steamers, bread makers, woks, electric kettles, toasters and coffee machines – I don’t think so.

Do you still use any gadgets you bought years ago?