The Hidden History of Everyday Kitchen Tools

Hey, it’s Grainy. Right now, in the drawer next to you, there are tools you use all the time and have never actually looked at. There is a hole in the pasta spoon, tabs on the ends of the foil box, a tiny hole in the pot lid, another hole in the handle, and a row of ovals on some knives. Most of us ignore them. Somebody sat in a design meeting and put each of those there on purpose. Or, in one famous case, the internet invented a purpose and then sold it back to you.

I will be honest about which reasons are real and which ones a feed made up. This is not a test kitchen and I did not buy five spoons to weigh spaghetti. It is a 2D documentary about objects that already live in the drawer, checked against people who bothered to cite a manufacturer, a patent, or a fact-check.

Watch the full story:

The Hole in the Pasta Spoon

You have probably heard the claim. The hole is a measuring tool. Push dry spaghetti through it and you have exactly one portion for one person.

Here is the honest version, and it matches what Snopes concluded in January 2024: that story is a mixture. Some spaghetti spoons are specifically designed with a hole meant to approximate a serving. That is not universally true. Hole sizes vary. A fancy spoon and a cheap spoon will measure different amounts. There is also no single legal “one portion” of spaghetti hiding inside every utensil. U.S. nutrition labels, as Snopes notes via FDA labeling rules and MedlinePlus, most often treat 2 ounces of dry long pasta as a serving. That is a label convention, not a spoon-engineering standard.

Metro’s June 2016 piece, which Snopes cites, talked to retailers after the claim went viral on Imgur and then through Cosmopolitan U.K., Food Network, Today, and Business Insider. A John Lewis spokesperson said the hole is for draining water and that they were not aware of a measuring function on the spoons they sold. Another shop said their holes were smaller than a single portion. That is the boring, sturdy reason: water and steam need a path while you stir and lift, so the spoon is not fighting the pot.

A few brands do market the hole as a portion guide. If the package says so, believe that package, not the entire category. Cute story. Do not trust it with dinner unless you have weighed the brand in your hand. A kitchen scale will beat folklore every time, which is why a scale shows up in our rice cooker accessories guide for a different job that also hates guesswork.

The Tabs on the Foil Box

This one is completely real, and it is printed on the cardboard.

Look at the ends of an aluminum foil box, or a box of plastic wrap. There are little punch-in tabs, often labeled something like “Press Here to Lock Roll.” Push them in. The tabs pop through the cardboard and into the hollow tube the roll spins on. Now the roll cannot fly out of the box every time you pull a sheet.

Slate wrote about these tabs in May 2013 and used their actual name: end locks. The appointed task, Slate said, is to hold the roll of foil or plastic wrap steady inside the box as you pull. Reynolds Wrap boxes print the instruction. Slate quoted a Reynolds spokesperson, Olson, on why almost nobody notices: people do not study instructions on objects they think they already understand, like tape or scissors. Olson also dated the feature. Reynolds, at least, did not add end locks to aluminum foil boxes until 1996. The explanatory text came shortly after.

Mental Floss later described the same geometry: perforated tabs on the ends of foil and plastic-wrap boxes, punched inward so they act as a cheap axle. That matches what you can still read on a current Reynolds-style box. I am not going to invent a Victorian inventor or a NASA origin story. Slate already joked that the Apollo version is fake. The documented history is later and simpler: a 1990s packaging tweak, labeled in plain English, ignored because the box looked like an object you already knew.

If your foil zigzags and the roll escapes, the fix was printed on the box the entire time.

A later U.S. patent, 10,202,255, even takes the 1996 Reynolds tabs as background. The inventor’s writeup says Reynolds Wrap started putting perforated end tabs on dispenser boxes that year, that almost every later brand copied the end lock, and that the printed instruction is often some version of “Press Here to Lock Roll.” I am citing that patent as history of the feature, not as a product I want you to buy. The cardboard tabs are already on the box you own.

The Steam Hole in the Pot Lid

That little hole in the top of a saucepan lid looks like a manufacturing leftover. It is not. It is a steam vent.

A pot lid is not a sealed pressure vessel. It is not building the kind of pressure a pressure cooker is designed and certified to hold. As water boils, steam collects under the lid and starchy bubbles climb the sides. With nowhere easy to go, that steam rattles the lid, and foam can spill up and over the edge. That is the classic boil-over, the same mess a rice cooker tries to manage with a vent and a catcher. See Why Does My Rice Cooker Bubble Over if you want that version of the problem.

The hole gives steam a planned path. U.S. Patent 2,348,452, issued May 9, 1944 and titled “Utensil lid,” is one named example of designers treating lid vents as a real problem, not decoration. Google Patents lists George P. Christopher of Seattle as the inventor and Lillian S. Christopher as the assignee. The specification talks about vent apertures that let steam disperse while trying to keep grease from flying out with it. Later cookware patents keep worrying about the same job. A 1999 patent assigned to Sunderland Holding Limited (U.S. 6,006,939) describes a steam-vent arrangement in a lid knob that can open on purpose when the pot gets hot.

I cannot honestly tell you that every cheap lid hole on a big-box saucepan traces to one of those patents. What I can tell you is the physics and the design record point the same way. The hole is a vent. It is there so the lid sits quieter and so boil-overs have one more way not to happen. Small hole. Deliberate job. If your lid has no hole, you already know the workaround: crack the lid yourself and listen for the rattle.

The Hole in the Pan Handle

The hole at the end of a pot or pan handle seems obvious. It is for hanging the pan on a hook. That is the designed use you can still read in hang-hole copy from cookware makers. Lodge, for one, sells skillets whose handles are punched for wall racks. A hanging hole is not a mystery. It is storage.

There is a bonus use that, once you see it, you will not unsee. Rest a dripping wooden spoon in that hole. The handle becomes a spoon holder. The spoon sits more upright. Some of the drips go back toward the pan instead of onto the counter.

Was every handle designed with that second job in mind? Probably not. A hole punched for a rack is also, accidentally, a pretty good spoon rest. I am not going to pretend a 19th-century foundry minutes page says “and also for spoons.” The video on this page hedges the same way, and I will keep the hedge. The hole is real. The hanging reason is the one manufacturers will sign. The spoon trick works and costs you nothing.

If you want a tool that was actually designed to keep a sticky surface off the counter, look at a rice paddle with a standing base, which is a much less accidental version of the same idea. That is in the accessories guide, not in this drawer tour.

The Dimples on a Santoku

Some kitchen knives, especially Santoku-style blades, have a row of oval hollows along the side. They look decorative. They are about contact, not jewelry.

Those hollows are a Granton-style edge, sometimes called a Granton edge or, in older German shop language, kullenschliff. Granton Knives of Sheffield still claims the name: the company’s own history says the Granton Edge, with precision-ground scallops on alternate sides of the blade, was patented more than 80 years ago, and that the Granton trademark is theirs. Hawley’s Sheffield Knives, a local cutlery history compiled from city records, dates William Grant’s “GRANTON EDGE” to 1928 and quotes the Sheffield Daily Independent of 21 February 1931 on the hollow-ground scallops. The brand name later got applied to a whole category of dimpled blades. Knife makers who still bother to explain the geometry say the scallops trap little pockets of air between the blade and a wet slice. That thin gap makes it harder for a potato, a cucumber, or a piece of fish to suction itself onto the steel. The food is more likely to fall away instead of riding up the blade.

This does not make the knife sharper. Sharpness is the bevel meeting the board. Dimples do not replace a whetstone. They are a release feature. If a brand’s own copy says “Granton edge for food release,” that is the claim I am willing to repeat. If a social post says the ovals “add laser sharpness,” that post is doing what the pasta-spoon meme did: filling a quiet design with a louder story.

A Granton edge also does not turn every Santoku into a carving knife. The hollows help most on foods that want to vacuum themselves onto a wide, wet face: boiled potatoes, cucumbers, raw fish. They do less for a dry crust of bread. If your knife has no dimples, you are not missing a secret civilization. You are missing a convenience some makers added and then rarely explained.

I am skipping a couple of extra objects the video mentions in passing, the wide rubbery foot on some box graters and the headspace under the rim of a glass measuring cup, because I will not stretch a caption into a sourced history. The rule still holds. If I cannot point to a maker, a patent, or a fact-check, it does not get its own heading.

Why the Myths Spread Faster Than the Manuals

Kitchen tools almost never come with a manual you keep. You inherit them, or you grab them off a shelf, and you learn by copying whoever taught you. The design intent disappears. That is exactly why a fun fake reason will fill the gap.

The pasta-spoon serving story spread because it is a complete little parable. One hole, one person, one dinner. Snopes can spend a page saying “mixture” and the parable still fits in a caption. The foil tabs went the other way. Reynolds printed the real instructions on the box in the 1990s, and a lot of households still never pressed them. Slate’s Reynolds quote is the whole problem in one sentence: people do not study the obvious objects.

So here is the rule I take away, and it is the same one the episode ends on. The real hidden features usually get printed on the tool, or they show up in a patent or a maker’s spec. The magical ones usually do not. Press the tabs on the foil box. Rest the spoon in the handle hole if you want. Gently retire the idea that every pasta spoon can measure dinner.

The same drawer often holds a can opener you also never looked at twice. I am not going to invent a secret history for that one either. If the opener in your hand is a side-cut model, the visible job is the whole job: it cuts below the lid lip so you are not left with a sharp ring. That is enough.

Somebody sweated the details so your food would come out right, then never got to explain it. That is kind of my whole thing. The rice cooker on the counter is the same story at appliance scale. A bimetallic switch and later a fuzzy-logic chip are just more elaborate versions of a hole that already knew what it was for. The refrigerator and the microwave are the same pattern in a bigger box: a designed job, almost never a kept manual.

I’m Grainy. Those were the hidden purposes hiding in plain sight.

Tools that earn a link

Only listings I can confirm, and only where the page actually used them:

• Etekcity kitchen scale if you want pasta portions that do not depend on a random spoon hole
• OXO Good Grips Smooth Edge can opener for the other tool in that same drawer
• Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker if this sent you back to the appliance that already explains itself with buttons

Related Articles

• The Strange History of the Refrigerator →
• The Strange History of Worcestershire Sauce →
• The Strange History of the Rice Cooker →
• The Accidental Invention of the Microwave →
• A Brief History of the Electric Rice Cooker →
• The Evolution of Rice Cookers →
• Rice Cooker Accessories Guide →
• All Learn guides →