The Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer

My mother's neighbor recently moved, and thanks to circumstances beyond the neighbor's control (advanced age, limited living space, a bossy daughter) much of her non-essential belongings ended up stacked four feet high and three feet deep on her curb in anticipation of their final ride in the garbage truck.  It would have been a shame to have let all her items go unappreciated.  It was a whole lifetime of stuff she'd acquired over the years--furniture, glassware, cookware, tchotchkes.  Of course I raided the stacks and quite frankly, I made out like a bandit.  I got a heavy, lidded roasting pan, a white vinyl step stool that I would say is retro only it's been with the original owner for about fifty years so that's...what?...ahh, vintage.  I took so much stuff my boyfriend had to pack the car like it was a giant 3-D puzzle.  Among my favorite things (it's a toss-up with the step stool) is the Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer.Swoon.Let me repeat that.  It is a FOOD.  GLAMORIZER.  Who doesn't want glamorous food which would then, of course, make you all that much more glamorous by association?  Made by Feature Products of Chicago, Illinois in 1963, the Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer is one glorious streamlined nugget of space-age technology, and ought to be a mandatory component in the tool belt of any domestic goddess.  Look at all it offers.

If only it sliced, diced, and julienned.

View One: Strip Cutter, Vegetable Scraper/Shredder and Peeler

Would you like to peel strips of zest off your lemons with ease?  Create carrot curls?  Shred cabbage?  Let the Food Glamorizer help!  And note how the handle slides neatly over the end not in use, to protect wifely hands while making radishes look like rosettes.  Because who doesn't want their radishes to look like rosettes?  Let's try, shall we? Using the Strip Cutter, the notch right at the very end of the Glamorizer, you pull down the sides of your radishes and then...OK, OK.  This one sort of looks like I've stuck an aorta onto the back end of my radish.  Maybe the results with the vegetable scraper will be better.Mmmm, beeee-yooo-teeeee-ful!Or, actually, opposite.  I admit, this one sort of looks like I've retrieved it from an early journey into the garbage disposal.  Or that I've surrounded it in raw chopped meat.  I can't decide which is less appealing.  They're both innately wrong.I won't trifle with you all regarding the vegetable peeler.  I assume you all know how to peel things.  It's time to flip the handle and see the other design elements incorporated into the Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer.Behold how the handle flips around and fits easily over either end!  When you have the peeler end covered, it makes for an incredibly comfortable grip for your Kitchen Magician Pocket Shiv.Well, you tell me what you're going to use that for.No, I kid!  It's not intended for use in stealthy prison murders.  It's the Fancy Cutter. It's for fancy cutting!  Let's see what this baby can do.Only...Do note: it's surprisingly sharp and goes into vegetables like they were made of butter.  This poor, mutilated radish was the result of some only slightly too angled initial cuts.Sigh.  I thought gadgetry was supposed to make the domestic goddess's life easier.  I thought I'd be making radish rosettes and harlequined lemons in no time!  Instead, this Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer is more like a Kitchen Barbarian Food Brutalizer.  No wonder it didn't become standard household equipment.  I wonder how many housewives of 1963 felt bad about themselves because they were serving their families inadequately glammed-up food?  O, the many perils of womanhood!  Frankly, I'm going to be too busy making food that is beautiful of its own accord to devote my time and energies into mastering the Food Glamorizer, no matter how glamorous that may seem.  But you know what?It looks kitschtastic when proudly and eye-catchingly displayed on my cookbook shelf.  What more could I possibly ask of it?