In Praise of the Box Grater -Bee Wilson 🌞

Last edited Mon Sep 1, 2025, 12:03 PM - Edit history (1)

(OXO Good Grips Etched Box Grater with Removable Zester )

In Praise of the Box Grater

“A good many cookery books start out by requiring
a vast battery of equipment without which the
simplest dish is doomed to failure (I always burst
into tears when I get to the bit about the little
porcelain ramekins).’
-Katherine Whitehorn, Cooking in a Bedsitter

Imagine a kitchen tool powerful enough to do the work of a hundred small
knives all at once. This miracle machine would be able to shred cheese in
seconds and mince garlic with ease. It would have the ability to release the
hidden fragrance from a nutmeg and to reduce a hard butternut squash to a
pile of soft strands. And it would do all this without electricity.

Most of us already have one of these wondrous gadgets in our kitchens.
It is the old-fashioned box grater. As food writer Burt Wolf observes, a
grater should really be understood as a complex kind of knife because the
whole surface is covered with cutting edges which slice efficiently in
unison. One idle morning, I decided to count the perforated holes on my
box grater. There were 50 holes on the coarse side and no fewer than 315
holes on the fine side. In addition, there was the underrated third side with
its single slicing blade which is surprisingly handy for making paper-thin
slices of anything from radish to cucumber, though I tend to forget about it.

Finally, there is the fourth side with its rasp-like raised surface which looks
more like a vicious foot file than a kitchen utensil. I suspect that most
people who say they don’t like box graters have had unpleasant experiences
with this side and its stabbing star-like holes. Food writer Rachel Roddy
refers to it as ‘the bastard side of the grater that you never want to use’.

Certainly, it does a terrible job of grating things such as orange zest, which
get mashed up and encrusted on the rasps, and it is a pain to wash up. But
Roddy explains that its one great use is for grating the pecorino for cacio e
pepe pasta into a powder fine enough to emulsify the cheese into a rich,
creamy sauce.

In its way, the box grater is the ideal kitchen tool: it achieves great
results with a whole range of ingredients from very minimal technology. (In
this, it is a world away from all the high-tech single-function cupcake
makers and overwrought coffee machines in the average cookware store,
which promise so much but often end up as mere clutter on the kitchen
counter). Homespun versions of a box grater used to be made at home from
a tin can or a cookie tin, drilled with a few holes. This was how Irish cooks
would traditionally grate the potatoes needed for boxty — a hearty potato
pancake.

I did not always recognise the exciting potential of the box grater. For
years, I was seduced by the pricier Microplane grater, which originated as a
woodworking tool. I loved the way these slim steel rectangles could turn a
hunk of Parmesan into cloudlike fluff. But then the handle broke off my
Microplane and although I bought a couple of replacements, I somehow
didn’t trust them in quite the same way. I found myself gravitating towards
my trusty old box grater which was there waiting for me at the back of a
drawer, where it had always been.

Here are some of the reasons I love my box grater, which is stainless
steel and made in Italy. It was as cheap as a couple of bags of coffee yet is
as excitingly versatile as one of those old four-in-one ballpoint pens that I
remember loving as a child. It can grate coarse carrots or beets for a wintry
slaw and fine lemon zest for the dressing. You might find yourself making a
lasagne which requires you to grate both nutmeg and cheese. The box grater
can do it all and yet it lacks the hefty price tag or the bling ofso many
moder kitchen gadgets. It really does deserve the name of ‘greater’, which
was the name of an American cheese grater marketed in Philadelphia in the
1920s. You can even use it to make breadcrumbs, using the coarse side, if
you don’t want to get the food processor out (which is a tip I picked up on
Twitter from someone who got it from People magazine, although only later
did I start reading around and see that actually, graters have been used to
make breadcrumbs for hundreds of years). I started collecting recipes that
called for grating rather than cutting and was surprised to discover that
ingenious cooks from Italy to India had long been using the grater for far
more than just cheese.

When multi-functional box graters were first sold on a mass scale in
America in the 1890s, they were seen as modern, clever and labour-saving,
even though the technology of grating itself was nothing new. Since ancient
times, cooks have used rough-surfaced objects for shredding hard
vegetables which might otherwise be too tough to chew. The Taino people
of the Caribbean used rough stone boards to grate root vegetables such as
cassava and sweet potatoes before cooking them. Cheese graters also go
back a long way. As long ago as the 1540s, a Frenchman called Frangois
Boullier invented a metal cheese grater as a way to use up the hard cheese
generated by a sudden dairy surplus in Europe.

But the ‘combination’ four-sided box grater made from tin in the 1890s
was something new: a grater for all your cutting needs, from shredding
cabbage for sauerkraut to zesting citrus peel and chocolate.

Really, all we need from a grater is that it should shred stuff in an easy
and effective way and, for my money, the box grater does this better than all
the fancy and overpriced deluxe cheese scrapers and rotary cheese graters. I
used to think that the fine side wasn’t fine enough for ginger and garlic but
now, for most uses, I have come to prefer the slightly larger strands that it
produces, which offer a stronger hit of flavour than Microplane-minced
ginger and garlic. I am satisfied by the sturdy simplicity of the design and
the way that the shreds of cheese or carrot or whatever pile up inside the
grater. And it is fast. I recently grated 250g of peeled carrot for a solo lunch
and it took me under a minute.

For making carrot salad for a crowd, I do sometimes set aside my box
grater and use the grater attachment on my food processor instead, which
has the added bonus of turning the carrots into long elegant strands, like the
carrot salads you find in France. And sometimes, because I am fickle, I
revert to the Microplane for ginger and cheese. But for everyday cooking, I
always find myself returning to the box grater because it works and because
it makes me happy every time I use it: to zest a lemon on the fine side and
use my fingers to extract the fragrantly oily yellow peel from the inside of
the box is a jolt of brightness on the way to dinner.

From "The Secret of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

I Love my box grater too! Thanks Bee!