Would you like to order, sir?
Credit: Jeff Gilbert
Across the decades and centuries men and women have endeavoured to create apparatus, machines and products that have promised to make life tastier, simpler or simply more fun.
And today I am face to face with an invention that aims to surpass them all. It’s cooking me lunch; fish stew, to be precise.
Denis Papin’s 17th century pressure cooker, the pop-up toaster of Charles Strite in 1919, Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s 1920s bread-slicing machine, Kenneth Wood’s Kenwood mixer of the late 1940s… these are all but kitchen froth in the light of what I am witnessing. In a laboratory in London’s Hammersmith I meet Robochef (Moley, to its engineers); the world’s first robotic kitchen.