Frugal Upstate,
Hi, I have an elderly friend who remembers something called a “frugal tool” It was on a long handle and had a round rubber bottom for getting the last bit of jelly or mayo out of the jar. I thought I’d check online to see if anything came up and you did. You haven’t hear of this little retro tool have you?
Pat M.
Unfortunately, as I wrote back to Pat, I have not heard of anything specifically called a “frugal tool”, nor have I seen something that matches that description. Have any of you? I know Lehmans-“The Old Fashioned Hardware Store” has all sorts of old fashioned and simple living tools, I searched all their kitchen wares section and couldn’t find anything like she described. I’d appreciate any help I could get in directing Pat to her specific “frugal tool”.
Personally I go with the old Amy D. (author of The Tightwad Gazette) philosophy that one of the most important frugal tools in the kitchen is a spatula. I use a thin spatula from a two pack at the dollar store to get all those last little drips and bits out. Frequently a jar that in the old pre-frugal days would have been thrown in the trash as “empty” winds up lasting through 2 or 3 more uses 🙂
The closest I’ve ever come to the described “frugal tool” was the mayonnaise knife–a plastic, twice-bent long handled blade for scraping the sides of jars (namely mayo), but it works for every other blessed thing in a jar. There’s even a rounded end on it for getting into the bottom corners that a regular knife cannot get into due to roundedness.
I found mine long ago in a grocery store “clip-strip”–one of those plastic strips full of incidental promo crap, such as a strip of can openers in the canned corn section, or a strip of boxed toothpicks in the charcoal aisle. This, of course, was in the peanut butter/mayo section.
Wenchy beat me to it! In catalogs like Harriet Carter it’s called a bottle or jar scraper.
Ha! I found a description here on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_scraper
And then, after a bunch of searching, I actually found something that looks like one here:
http://www.fantes.com/spatulas.htm
You have to scroll to the bottom of the page, it costs $2.69
I am a big fan of the spatula too. I can usually get another sandwich out of our jars if I give it a good scrape before I toss it. Amazing how much we waste before figuring out how much we could save!!
I know-sometimes being frugal doesn’t take much more effort. I mean really, how much time does it take to scrape the mayo jar with a spatula?