Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online in person, and on the go. Shopify's made for

entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

Hey, it's Francis. This week, we wanted to bring back an episode from a while ago,

featuring one of the most truly wonderful I Love New York

stories ever about a man who made himself of a legend by selling vegetable peelers.

It's a whole show about the secret lives of kitchen tools.

Hope you enjoy it.

I'm Francis Lamb, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, the show for curious cooks and eaters.

That's me and my knife bag. For years, we have been inseparable. I've got everything I need in here. A chef's knife, a paring knife, a serrated, a steel, a rubber spatula, a fish spatula, a peeler, a corkscrew, fish tweezers, a thermometer, a microplane tongs, an oyster shucker, and the absolute best cooking spoon in the world. Nine inches long with a flat wide bowl that fits exactly two and a half tablespoons of water.

You know, the little things, the little inanimate objects that cooks come to love like they were actual friends. Just because they're made of metal, wood, and plastic, doesn't mean they

don't have rich interior or emotional lives. This week, it's all about the surprising stories of the little tools in your kitchen.

We'll hear from a bladesmith whose best career advice came to him in a dream.

We'll hear about the world's greatest vegetable peeler salesman.

And first, let me start with a question for you.

What would you say is the most important tool in your kitchen, the one you

literally cannot cook without? Well, sorry, it was a trick question because the tools we use,

even the ones we absolutely depend on, are all cultural. And that means nothing is truly essential

because cooks have been making great food using totally different tools than you or me

since we climbed down from the trees. So Tim Hayward is a British food writer and an obsessive

about the history of kitchen tools. We talked to him about some of the ones people think they can't

live without and about the ones that did kind of change everything.

Tim, thanks for joining us today.

...