The Cuisinart brand name has become nearly as generic as Band-Aid and Kleenex, used to describe any food processor. It is so much a part of the essential food-prep battery that it is hard to believe it was hailed as a modern miracle less than forty years ago. When it first hit the market, the Cuisinart’s sheer power seemed so radical and its whirling blades so awesome that a branch of sick humor sprung from it (Q: What’s green and goes 100 miles per hour? A: A frog in a Cuisinart), and to this day, all manufacturers of food processors engineer their product so that the snap of the work bowl clicking into locked position ensures that fingertips are out of danger—a reassuring sound, like a bank vault ker-chunk.
Despite its sudden popularity in America in the late 1970s, the Cuisinart was not new. It had been discovered in 1971 by retired physicist Carl Sontheimer, who was fascinated by the possibilities of a restaurant food preparation machine he came across while traveling in France. Sontheimer modified the tool for home cooks by lengthening the feed tube and creating the fail-safe lock. He then began demonstrating its infinite uses to such important taste-makers as James Beard, Julia Child, and the editors of Gourmet magazine.
Sontheimer had a formidable task: to prove that his was a serious cook’s tool, not yet another electric corn-popper, egg-cooker, or infrared broiler that had momentarily fascinated amateur cooks of the 1950s and 1960s, but was then soon relegated to attics or to yard sales. His greatest achievement was differentiating the food processor from the Veg-O-Matic, the most infamous culinary thingamajig of all time, bought by nine million people in the 1960s, thanks to televised ads that touted its ability to hack up any fruit or vegetable in the blink of an eye. Ron Popeil, whose father and uncle before him had sold millions of Chop-O-Matics, Mince-O-Matics, and Dial-O-Matics, had positioned his miracle nonelectric appliance as a cheap little gadget, the TV pitchman screaming its myriad virtues to viewers like a blazing Tommy gun, concluding his breathless spiel with a less-than-reassuring promise: “IT REALLY WORKS!”
The Cuisinart, with its vaguely Gallic name ending in the word art, was clearly not a cheesy as-seen-on-TV gadget. America’s aspiring cooks came to see it as equivalently necessary to the preparation of world-class meals as extra-virgin olive oil. That it saved time and effort (the selling point of so many kitchen gizmos) was ultimately less significant than the fact that it allowed an ambitious cook to do things that had previously been the province of experts with complicated tools: to blend pâtés, to whip a mousse, to slice vegetables as finely as if they had slid from a master chef’s mandoline. It was a big first step in the fashion of putting professional equipment in lay kitchens.