Vintage Kitchen Items Mama Will Remember

Bread boxes in countless colors once adorned every countertop, and we think they should be brought back.

Although wooden dough bowls were formerly used to let dough rise, they’re now extremely popular as centerpiece containers.

Mama had her flour, sugar, coffee, and more in matching labeled tins. With rustic and retro looks on the rise, labeled kitchen tins are coming back in style.

If you didn’t have a punch bowl with matching glasses at your party, was it really a party? Bonus points if you had a Tom and Jerry Christmas set.

Milk glass has made a comeback, and we’re so glad we kept all of Mama’s around.

Coffee drinkers everywhere should be happy we don’t have to hand-crank our coffee grinders anymore.

You may see modern egg separators out there, but the first ones were made of tin.

This tool was widely used for cutting angel food cakes and other soft cakes, as the delicate tines wouldn’t crush or compress the cake under pressure. Cake breakers were so popular that you could even find one in your silver pattern.

Herb cutters came in different styles than this one. For example, some herb cutters had a handle on both sides of the blade for each hand.

You had a Jell-O mold for every season, occasion, and size.

Next time you walk away from your standing mixer as it's beating eggs, remember how hard these vintage hand mixers were to use.

Not only were there hand-crank flour sifters like this one, there were flour sifters from a later era with handle pumps.

Fondue sets were the grooviest way to have a night in.

Before the appliance world went stainless steel, kitchens featured appliances, countertops, and cabinets in many shades of pastel and bright colors.

If you wanted the softest mashed potatoes, you’d use a potato ricer rather than a masher.

Some butter dishes like these were shaped to fit a stick of butter and others were round for tub butter. Another vintage butter tool was a butter mold, used to press beautiful patterns in the butter for table presentation.

It seems like this vintage tomato slicer might just leave you with a mushy tomato mess.

Because you just couldn’t use your tomato slicer on your eggs.

Whose Mama didn’t have some colorful or patterned Pyrex mixing bowls?

We hope the tradition recipe card boxes never dies. Even though you can save recipes online, there’s nothing like a handwritten recipe card that can be passed down.

It isn’t that our mothers and grandmothers had more hours in the day than we do now. They just took the time to make everything, like a mundane hot pad, a little more beautiful.

The hunt is on for vintage butter molds now that more and more cooks are making homemade butter. Sure, you can just plop your butter in a bowl, but how much prettier it will look when you use a decorative mold.

Long before the easy twist-and-pop plastic ice trays or automatic ice dispensers, these aluminum gadgets served to keep glasses of sweet tea filled with ice.

If you ever used one of these, you probably still have it, because it has never gone out of use or style. Before we started using pot-folders and tea towels for hot pads, these trivets stood between countertops and hot pots. They also make for pretty wall décor when not in use.