Most people know Peugeot as a manufacturer of passenger cars and commercial vehicles, or perhaps bicycles, but the French brand, which was founded as a family business more than two centuries ago, has long been associated with the culinary arts and hospitality.
The Peugeot brothers, Jean Pierre and Jean Frédéric, founded their company in 1810. Initially, they had a steel foundry, but they soon started producing saw blades and other metal hand tools. At that time, steel and women’s fashion were much more closely related, and Peugeot achieved success with women’s skirts and dresses with steel rims, which were much lighter than usual and therefore more comfortable to wear. However, the real breakthrough was achieved with the creation of various grinders and spice sprinklers, and this business is still one of Peugeot’s most successful enterprises.
At the brand, they were constantly researching new areas where they could make use of their expertise gained with metalworking and metal tools, which led to the fact that in 1840, Peugeot created its first coffee grinder, the R model, which was immediately offered in ten different sizes. It was a practical tool, as it treated the coffee beans delicately: instead of heating them up during grinding, it cut them into small pieces with its delicate blades, thus bringing out the aromas inherent in them.
Image: Peugeot
Not long after, Peugeot’s now iconic tabletop pepper shaker appeared, interestingly, the naming started from the end of the alphabet, which is how it became the Z model. At first, its body was made of white porcelain, later metal, vinyl and wooden versions also appeared. Its popularity is so unbroken that it is still produced today, it is part of the French lifestyle, you can almost certainly find the Z model on the tables of French bistros and cafes, but it even appears in the Formula 1 paddock.
Small industrial works of art also have a literary effect, because when Lewis Carroll wrote his novel Alice in Wonderland, he literally found inspiration for a part of his novel on the table. Seeing Peugeot’s tabletop pepper shaker, he decided that one of his characters, the Hatter, always had such a pepper grinder with him and used it regularly, and because of this, the people of the Red Queen’s court were constantly sneezing.
The popularity of Peugeot’s pepper spray knew no bounds. In the 1930s, the French brand had already been producing cars for decades when Jean Pierre Peugeot decided to visit some of the major American car factories. At a reception, his hosts proudly boasted to him that everything he saw in the hall was an American product. “Just about everything,” answered Peugeot, then picked up the pepper shaker on the table: “it’s French and made by Peugeot.”
Manual wine grinders and salt shakers, as well as coffee grinders, have not gone out of fashion to this day, but electric versions have appeared parallel to the development of technology. As electric motors have become smaller and more powerful, but at the same time quieter, such versions have become more and more common.
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However, this did not prevent Peugeot engineers from further developing the mechanism of manually operated salt and pepper grinders. They have developed a patented mechanism that enables grinding with three different finenesses in the case of their salt shaker, and six in the case of the pepper grinder, since different foods require different finenesses of grinding.
Encouraged by the success of the manual spice grinders, Peugeot continued to expand in the field of culinary arts. Over the years, it has developed a serious product range of various baking molds and dishes, from cake ovens to muffin tins and serving dishes. They have scratch-resistant, burn-proof enameling and ceramic that keeps dishes warm for up to half an hour.
In many places, the consumption of wine and other drinks is part of the meal, so Peugeot also offers decanters and whiskey glasses, which are made by hand by master glassblowers. A typical 21st-century product is the electric corkscrew with a lithium-ion battery, which stores enough energy to open 80 bottles, and if it runs out, it can be recharged in 2.5 hours. The same electrical system works in modern salt and pepper shakers, which enable grinding with various finenesses, and the company offers a lifetime guarantee for its metal mechanism.
Image: Peugeot
Source: www.vezess.hu
