How grate thou art

Our big KitchenAid mixer became my trusty tool more than two decades ago, when I started cooking in earnest, and we had to drive an hour into the western suburbs to pick up accessories at the Hobart factory office, because nobody else sold the damn things.

In the ensuing years, I've used it to mix, whip, beat, slice, grate, grind or otherwise process things thousands of times. (I hate to think how many loaves of bread our poor dough hook has turned out.) And bought pasta attachments, grinders (at three levels of coarseness), sausage-stuffers, juicers, even a buffer (which I threw out the other night because the bristles finally came loose after a couple decades).

But the accessory I've replaced three or four times has been the grater housing. Plastic, and prone to breakage at the point where it connects to the power take-off. And now you can buy them where you buy . . . oh, light bulbs.

Which was why, when I was at Ben and Ken's for dinner the other night, and they said they'd culled their cabinets for a garage sale, I whooped when I saw Ben's mother's vintage grater.

Most of you wouldn't understand this -- I'm not sure Ben and Ken did -- but to a longtime cook: This, in '50s aluminum, would never crack. A lifetime of grating, shredding and slicing!

They seemed puzzled by my reaction but insisted that I take it home, where I hand-polished it and then buffed it . . . which is when I threw the buffer out, because there were bristles all over the kitchen.

But that grater: Gratest!