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Food

Meet the Deli Slicer Savior of Canada

By day, chef Michael Olson is a teacher at a culinary school, but on his spare time this chef pimps out vintage deli slicers, turning them into muscle cars of the kitchen.
Photos courtesy Michael Olson.

The kitchen centrepiece of any hardcore home cook—you know, the type that anticipates wild leek season more than the birth of their own child—is a gleaming stand mixer in a colour named either after carnival food or a garden vegetable. But for culinary instructor Michael Olson, his trophy is a souped-up deli slicer in his kitchen. Actually, he's got 24 of them.

A refurbished 1940 Streamliner Meat Slicer from Hobart.

"It's an aspect of food that we often overlook," says Olson, 51, who happens to be the husband of Canadian TV chef Anna Olson. "We appreciate the beauty of ingredients and flavour of dishes, and laud the people who cook it, but we often ignore these things that are all around us in the food business. This is paying tribute to them."

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The chef-turned-teacher at Niagara College's culinary program started collecting them about three-and-a-half years ago when he took it upon himself to help a friend refurbish a junk, 60-year-old deli slicer. "It had beautiful design lines, but it looked like hell," he says. "It was ugly, old, and beat-up."

MeatSlicer_Maple_Leaf

A 1940s Berkel meat slicer painted to represent the Toronto Maple Leafs team colours.

He took it to an auto-repair shop, but the car guys didn't know what to do with it. He eventually found a guy who could repair them back to running order, as well as a powder-coating company that could give these dull, lifeless machines a new coat of cherry red or peacock blue. Word got around eventually and the collector now has a side hobby of equipping restaurants and chefs' homes with these relics that have been given a second life.

His customers include chef Susur Lee, oyster savant John Bil of Honest Weight fish shop, Baker & Scone bake shop, the chef at the Air Canada Centre (home of the Toronto Maple Leafs) where his slicer is painted in team colours, and the Norman Hardie winery in Prince Edward County.

"I always loved the shape of these industrial designs in the kitchen," he says. "The more I got into collecting them, my friends wanted them too. I started to buy all these old junkers and got to know them."

His research took him down the appliance K-hole and to the American kitchen equipment company the Hobart Corporation, which started making kitchen equipment at the end of the 19th century. In 1919, Hobart formed the Kitchen Aid division where the the stand mixer, was introduced. The man behind popularizing the mixer, Egmont Arens, also designed the Streamline Meat Slicer in the 40s. It made such an impact on American design that it is now part of the permanent collections at MoMa collection as well as the Brooklyn Museum.

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'I would be so bold as to say that [the old slicers work] better than most modern slicers.'

Another big name in the slicer world is Berkel, the company credited with inventing the meat slicer in 1898. The company was founded by a Dutch butcher named Welhelmus Adrianus Van Berkel, who was trying to invent a more efficient way to slice meat. Rather than having the hand move across the slab of bacon with a knife, he created a machine where the meat would move against a static, rotating blade.

"There was this whole Modernist movement at the time where designers were really enamoured with the airplane wing in the 30s and 40s," says Olson. "People loved the shapes of propellers and wings, so those shapes appeared in Airstream trailers [and] Buicks had these huge, bulbous fenders…You can see the sweeping curves, an organic, muscular look that took a utilitarian machine and put some soul into it."

While he wouldn't call himself the sole expert on meat slicers—there isn't much documentation on the history of these things, save for very old catalogues and unreliable crowd-sourced info on the web—Olson is able to guess the decade from which the slicer is from by simply looking at it. This is where he geeks out.

"In the 20s and 30s, [slicers] were mostly manual and didn't rely on electric power," he says. "They looked boxy, had sharp edges, and looked like they belong on a tractor. Later on in the 30s and 40s is when you start seeing the aerodynamic forms and the airplane influence. The 50s and 60s, they got bigger, had chrome add-ons, and had a lot of firepower." He trails off after that, saying that by the time the 70s rolled around, the quality of slicers plummeted and were not worth collecting. "I would be so bold as to say they [the old slicers] work better than most modern slicers."

"I just want to see these go to a good home," he says. "I'd love to host an art show, serve lots of charcuterie, and have these on display so people can buy them." But would the deli slicer ever be as ubiquitous as the stand mixer? "I don't think so," he says. "These are specialty tools."