The oldest kitchen utensils are undoubtedly the mortars and pestles that ancient cooks used to prepare grain for baking and to grind wild nuts into a thick paste. But close behind these essential kitchen items were certainly wooden spoons, to stir that paste as it bubbled in a clay pot over an open flame. Today, though, when we think of antique and vintage cooking utensils, images of mortars, pestles, and wooden spoons are accompanied by those of potato mashers, whisks, eggbeaters, and sieves. Made of tin, enamelware, and steel, these utensils were the workhorses of the kitchen, before electric mixers, submersible blenders, and NutriBullets did half of our cooking for us. The first category of utensils are the ones you hold in your hand, the descendants of those ancient wooden spoons. In fact, wooden spoons are still tremendously useful to modern cooks, whether they're used for stirring a spaghetti sauce or tossing a salad. Metal spoons, particularly the stainless-steel ones used in commercial kitchens, are also in vogue. Fitted with a hole at the end of their long handle so they can be hung on a hook, these spoons come in solid or slotted varieties, sometimes with wooden handles. Solid spoons are great for stirring sauces as they simmer in a cast-iron pot on the stove, or for basting a chicken baking in a Dutch oven. Slotted spoons are best for stirring pasta as it boils in a pot, so that your rigatoni or farfalle can be checked before it goes past the point of al dente perfection. Ladles are another type of spoon utensil, sometimes made of stainless steel but also available in vintage enamel or graniteware. Like spoons, ladles are made in a variety of styles and sizes, which means a well-equipped kitchen might have one large ladle for soup, another smaller one for sauces such as Hollandaise, and a third made of glass and used exclusive for cold drinks such as punch. Ice cream scoops and melon ballers are also branches on the kitchen-spoon family tree. A close cousin of the kitchen spoon is, of course, the kitchen fork, which might be used to hold a roast steady as it's carved or to poke holes in a potato before baking. Then there's the spatula, not the rubber kind for squeegeeing cake batter from a bowl but the flat ones with slots for flipping flapjacks. Measuring cups and spoons are often lumped in with kitchen utensils, but so are items that might also be described as gadgets. These include food mills, all sorts of sieves and colanders, and grinders designed to pulverize everything from nutmeg to coffee beans. Whisks, too, are considered kitchen utensils, as are egg beaters, whose handles and manual cranks suggest nothing so much as drills, which, not surprisingly, are often advertised as "egg beater" style drills. Finally, another utensil that could be described as a tool is the humble potato masher, which is often made of heavy wire that's attached to a wooden handle. And speaking of mashing, there is a whole world of menacing meat tenderizers awaiting your discovery, from heavy mallets with beefy wooden handles to smaller tools designed to carefully flatten a tender slice of veal or chicken breast.