Appliances and the kitchens they fill have evolved around the men who now inhabit them?even if appliance brands would prefer not to talk about it I was 22 when my mother handed me the first kitchen appliance that was ever my very own: her old Crock-Pot, a ceramic white oval that had long since yellowed, with a delicate blue floral pattern, probably purchased around 1980. It had belonged to her mother, my mom told me when I moved into my first apartment. Its lid was long gone but aluminum foil would do just fine, and someday, when I finally got interested in cooking, maybe it would come in handy.

As mothers often are, she was right; after six months of frozen Healthy Choice dinners, I started cooking variation after variation of chicken breast in the aging Crock-Pot, surprised and delighted at how little effort could produce something so thoroughly resembling an actual homemade meal. Lemon garlic chicken, barbecue beer chicken, eight-hour coq au vin; soon, considering myself something of a Crock-Pot maestro, I decided to upgrade to a new one. But in late 2012, when I began exploring the market for Crock-Pots, now generally known by the trendier generic term ?slow cooker,? none of the best-selling varieties even remotely resembled my rotund electric Mrs. Potts. Instead, I found a vast selection of chrome and matte-black products that looked like they?d just rolled off the assembly line at the Axe body spray factory. What we now know is that kitchen appliances were in ...