There’s something about finding the right tool, that unimagined carry out, that is so satisfying it seems primal. If we as a species are Homo faber, our tools are a part of us, and discovering a new one could be to ascertain a new organ. A new identity even, which is why our choice of tools can be so fraught. For example, I love coffee as much as the next American, but I know that a man with a manual bean grinder is an embassy’s worth of red flags.
Until recently, the most démodé kitchen object was not a specific carry out but an entire category, what celebrity chef Alton Brown calls “unitaskers”: implements that have only one function. “The only unitasker allowed in my kitchen,” he likes to quip, “is a fire extinguisher.” Brown has subjected any number of unitaskers to his ire: avocado slicers, kale strippers, all-edge brownie pans, pulled-pork meat claws.
Brown’s critique is not based on a desire for minimalism but an attachment to common sense and common scenes. Everyday kitchen implements, used with a bit of creativity, can be made to accomplish the same ends. Brownie batter poured into a muffin tray will produce circular brownies with an entirely cooked edge. Pork can be pulled with forks. One can, in fact, strip one’s own kale (or buy it, stripped and bagged). Unitaskers ponder a simplicity, a gullibility and, the critique goes, an excess of misused storage space that clever, sophisticated, underpaid and urban-dwelling cosmopolitans lack.
It’s high time we recognise the complexity of the category of unitaskers and adopt the specificity of tools whose use, though singular, is vital: burr grinders, cheese wires, spherical ice-cube makers. Let me add another to the list of gourmand’s essentials: grape scissors.
Grape scissors are exactly what they sound admire: a special pair of scissors designed for separating a serving-sized cluster of grapes from a larger bunch, with an L-shaped blade that allows the user not only to cut, but also to lift the cluster of grapes between the flat edges. Why might you need this Victorian carry out?
“Grape scissors must always accompany the grapes,” advised the venerable Mrs Beeton in 1861, “as without them serving is very difficult.” As we head into this season of holiday parties, of distant cousins and too-close colleagues, we’d do well to heed Mrs Beeton’s warning.
Consider the centrality of grapes to the traditional fruit platter. Amid the mouldering slices or cubes of melon, the slightly bruised strawberries, the berries in quantities too small to make them anything but garnish, there, heaped in all their green and ruby glory, shine the grapes. There may be other, more exotic fruits to catch the eye, but grapes are the constant of the fruit display, the guiding light, the star of the show. Fresh where cut fruit wilts, abundant in comparison to the other finger fruits, grapes are both classical and decadent — the fruit of Socrates and Caravaggio.
And yet, a fruit best presented in its bunched form makes for a tricky predicament. Fork, knife, spoon, tongs, fingers — all are inadequate to the task of gracefully and hygienically separating part from whole. And the stakes are existentially high during this time of holiday gatherings, when you have to confront those impossible second cousins who wear winter white and yet never seem to spill even a little bit of port on their immaculate cashmeres.
I am sure we can all hear the indictment ringing in Prunella’s voice when she asks you, from the far back of a queue of restless and judgmental relations, if you “need any help”, as you struggle to transfer each singular grape by means of finicky tongs to your too-tiny cocktail plate.
Growing up, it seemed to me that this was simply the way of the world. We had eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree and now we had to see its sweet perfection made onerous and unpleasant at social gatherings. Reader, I have come to tell you that another world is possible. You had grape scissors before, and you can have grape scissors again.
The first time I saw grape scissors was at Oxford. I was a postdoctoral fellow, dining at one of the older colleges, having “second dessert” in the senior common room. As decanters of port and claret and muscat and plates of fruit and chocolate were passed around (all on a beautiful, presumably 19th-century dining set), I noticed an ornate pair of scissors on the rim of the bowl of grapes. They were gorgeous in their excess, wrought with fruited vines along both handles, and I knew immediately what they were for, though their existence seemed to evaluate the bounds of Oxford’s already archaic self-image.
If I became obsessed with this tool (obviously, I did), it was not without some trepidation. I was born and raised in Louisiana; I eat with my fingers. I ate french fries with my fingers at lunch at my Oxford college’s faculty-only “high table”, dipping them into several piled-up packets’ worth of ketchup. There I sat with the illustrious dons on a dais, literally elevated above the students, and once managed to get beer-battered haddock in my hair. This is all to say that although I loved my life at Oxford, I was wary of becoming one of Those Americans whose romance with Britishness, and specifically Oxbridge’s anachronistic performance of a particularly classed Britishness, becomes unseemly, if not politically suspect.
While some pairs of grape scissors can be traced back to the Regency period, their popularity arose from the proliferation and increasing complication of dining etiquette among the Victorians. According to an exhibit label at the Victoria and Albert Museum: “It was important to be able to recognise items such as nut picks, sardine tongs and grape scissors, and to know how to use them correctly.”
It doesn’t feel admire a coincidence to me that the other grape scissor enthusiast I’ve found is a curator at the Museums of History in New South Wales. We are both ex-colonials, of a culture distinct but also partly descended from the one that made grape scissors such a popular wedding present.
Can one separate an object from its fusty history? I’d be lying if I claimed that the appeal of this tool lay wholly for me in its functionality (although they are functional for the purpose in a way that office scissors aren’t). To me, grape scissors are beautiful in their queerness, or at least campy in their pretension to glamour. In the wondrous depths of YouTube there exists a clip of Stephen Fry beaming over a pair with his own appreciation, holding them as if a current of electricity runs from their blades up through to his spine. “I recognise these!” he exclaims. “I used to play with them as a child!” How lovely to have a tool that turns work into play.
Holding them, I also play at having a life of greater ease and opulence than my circumstances allow, a life where the joy of eating and good conversation, without hitch or impediment, can have the importance that I want it to have. With a pair at my table, I offer that life, for an evening, to my guests.
Grape scissors are also different from the other unitaskers popular among my friends, which tend to propose expertise and connoisseurship — the home barista with her espresso machine and milk frother, the Bake Off hopeful with his pastry cutter and piping set, the aficionado of Italian cuisine with their stainless-steel pasta maker. The problem with a cherry pitter is not just that you can do the same thing with a paring knife — you can make pasta with a knife and a rolling pin, after all — but that it suggests a lack of expert facility. Real cooks pit their cherries by hand.
After the 1930s, grape scissors suggested a priggish adherence to outmoded decorum. What was once understood as expertise in the art of hosting became attachment to a defunct status symbol. And now? Could we rescue grape scissors from the dustbin of history?
I had little in common with my father except for a love of cooking, a real curiosity about new foods and ways to prepare them. He passed away last December, and when I finished at Oxford and returned to the US, I went through his kitchen. There were a lot of unitaskers: a turkey deep fryer; a rotisserie, probably two feet long by one foot wide; more than one garlic press. And there were other silly things. Monogrammed champagne flutes. Rocks glasses with the insignia of the US Marine Corps. Enough crystal candy dishes for a dozen grandmothers. I could trace a life through these objects: a ridiculous 1970s bachelordom, sitting down with a friend and some whiskey to watch — what else? — another documentary about the second world war. It is not what I want for myself, of course, but I was glad he had everything he wanted. There were no grape scissors.
Presumably someone will have to go through my things when I die. And when they find the grape scissors I just ordered from Etsy — silver-plated, simple, with grapes and grape leaves carved into their curvy handles — I admire to imagine it will have been a bygone trend of some curiosity. Perhaps that person will try the scissors out on a ripe bunch of grapes and think about the pleasurable snap and burst of the picking and eating.
How we gather around food to feel a similar pleasure, to break free of our own stalks and shells, to be brought together by objects whose beauty and care are in glorious excess of our needs. How we feel, as we hold something that gleams or glitters, that we, too, gleam and glitter in each other’s light.
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