Once you reach a certain age, a visit to your parents’ house can feel like a trip back in time. And no other room in the house seems to spark as much nostalgia as the kitchen. Rifle through the cupboard under the stove or peer through the pantry, and you’ll quickly find yourself taking a fond (and sometimes frightening) stroll down memory lane. What is it about parents and stuff, anyway? It’s like they’ve been pre-programmed to never throw anything away. We foraged through our own folks’ kitchen collections, and among the millions of empty jars and Chinese takeaway containers, we found a goldmine of retro kitchen kit. Here’s our pick of the best (and worst). Any of these look familiar to you?
These brightly coloured canisters could be used to store tea, biscuits or sugar, but usually just ended up sitting in a corner of the kitchen behind the kettle, with one ancient tea bag left forgotten at the bottom.
The Tupperware drawer is the Bermuda Triangle of food storage solutions. Containers go in whole, then somehow immediately lose their lid. It’s like some kind of plastic purgatory, where containers are forced to wander for eternity, searching for their other half. Even if you do find a lid that looks right, it always ends up being 2mm too big or too small, like the kitchen equivalent of a dating app – lots of potential matches, but nothing ever fits quite right. So you buy more Tupperware to compensate, and on the cycle continues. This experience was only heightened with the old-school ‘Servalier’ canisters, which had lids that were impossible to seal properly, even when the size was exactly right.
Probably better known as ‘the chip bowl’, this ubiquitous piece of kitchen kit would come out whenever your parents were entertaining. If you were really fancy, you’d have the whole set, including the woven wooden salad servers, which were about as useful at serving salad as using two wet fish to serve dinner.
Now this will always be a kitchen classic. These instantly recognisable casserole dishes have been used to create countless shepherd’s pies, pasta bakes and tuna mornays for generations. Durable, reliable and easy to clean, CorningWare was also the ideal wedding gift when you couldn’t think of anything else to buy. The vintage wares are now even worth a bit of cash, as a kitchen retro revival spreads across social media. One set of CorningWare L’Echalote Spice of Life dishes is currently selling on Etsy for AU$30,000.00.
Equally classic, if a little less glamorous-looking, these sturdy, heat-resistant borosilicate glass products are the kitchen all-rounders. From the instantly recognisable measuring cup to the hardworking bakeware that’s seen you through more lasagnes than you can count, no kitchen is really complete without at least one Pyrex item.
These seemed like such a good idea, but mostly just took up way too much space in the cupboard under the sink. Annoying to use, annoying to clean, annoying to take out and annoying to put away, every family of a certain generation had one of these in their kitchen anyway.
Many a frustrated baker has had a run-in with a pair of these. Do they work? Eventually. Will you have given up the will to live by the time they do? Most likely.
These came to the rescue just in time, providing a far better beating experience, but throwing in their own curveball by designing the shape of the beaters in such a way that it was almost impossible to dislodge sticky ingredients from them, meaning that you spent more time poking wodges of butter and sugar out of nooks and crannies than it would have taken you to mix everything together by hand.
These collectible porcelain spice jars shaped like little houses have had something of a renaissance of late, thanks to ThriftTok, which is all about sharing secondhand finds. The original Lennox Village collection has been discontinued for more than 30 years, so if your folks happen to have a full collection, they could be sitting on a small goldmine. However, as anyone who was once a little girl would know, if your parents had these, you would have broken at least one while using them to decorate your Barbie Dreamhouse. A second edition of Lenox Spice Village is now available, but a quick look on the Lenox website at the time of writing showed that it was sold out.
There has to have been one Christmas when every mum or dad was given one of these. After the ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s, the shiny new gadget would be brought out of its box and set to work on a leg of lamb, at which point, bits of meat would fly everywhere, a regular knife would be fetched, and the electric carving knife would be relegated to its box and left to moulder quietly in a corner of the laundry cupboard where old cans of bug spray go to die.
These have been around for so long, your nan would most likely have a set or two lurking about somewhere. Many shapes. Many sizes. All rather hideous, TBH. This hasn’t stopped them selling for a pretty penny on eBay.
Just like the woven wooden salad bowl, these were an entertaining staple, and since they were all but impossible to clean, hygiene was assured by placing a paper towel at the bottom of each one before filling with bread. Or more likely, chips. It’s amazing any of us made it out of the ’80s alive.
Orange seemed to be the kitchen colour du jour in the 1970s, at least for these pots, which boasted a design style that could, at best, be labelled as ‘questionable’.
Who doesn’t have fond childhood memories of being allowed to ‘lick the bowl’ after Mum had finished making a cake? These big, beautiful bowls will always be a kitchen classic, and also make for a great gift idea for anyone who’s just starting out on their baking journey.
You’ll find these at every old-school neighbourhood Chinese restaurant, and in every old-school kitchen across the country. Since they’re all but unbreakable, they were perfect for kids’ lunches and impromptu games of backyard frisbee.
