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vintage1963

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Jun 26, 2015
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I found these gems the other day at an antique mall not far from where I live. They were having a going out of business sale. The Nesco cooker was 5 dollars and the lamp was 6 dollars. The shade on the lamp isn't original but I think it goes well.

The Nesco is in excellent shape and looks barely used. It came with the power cord, inner rack, removable insert, and owners manual.

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I have that same Nesco roaster but the badge/chart on mine is a sliver blue shade.   Mine didn't have its rack, but it was in great shape otherwise and priced right (I don't remember exactly) so I grabbed it.

 

I agree that the shade works on that lamp.  Nice scores!
 
Thanks, Ralph! I was quite surprised to find the Nesco. It was sitting on the floor by a huge display of other items and I just happened to look down and it caught my eye. I immediately snatched it up. The lamp was sitting on a table a few feet away. It's a cool lamp and I can't believe I got it.
 
Thanks for the photos of the manual!

Nesco reintroduced their oval roasters in the 70s as slow cookers. Your Roaster booklet makes no mention of that, does not mention putting the porcelain inset pan in the dishwasher and the address on the back has Zone 16, so I think you have a real oldie there. They last forever and keep cooking. I have an oval one and a round one that are old.

When Rich's opened their cooking school in the early-mid 70s with Nathalie Dupree at the helm, those of us in the housewares departments in all of the stores were her guinea pigs; one store each day. She had chosen equipment from the store, but did not have a great grasp on small electrics. She had the people who worked in the small electrics departments make pate aux choux in the just introduced Cuisinart food processor, but her staff filled an orange Nesco oval roaster with oil in which the students were to deep fry the little pastries. Well the thermostat was set at 375 and the signal light went out, but the little balls of dough did not even make bubbles. I saw what had happened, explained it to her and went out on the floor and found a real deep fryer with the guts to do the job, maybe a rectangular Nesco FryRyte. We cleaned the packing dust from it, filled it with the hot oil, carefully, and fried the hell out of some dough. Of course we could have done the frying in a pan on the Sensi Temp Burner, but the purpose of the class was to use small electrics. Each cooking station had an absolutely beautiful 1974 GE TOL 30" Range J39001WH. I stood in front of that range and whispered a prayer that I would have one one day. I have had two thanks to John: a harvest one that was coated in grease and had really been abused and then the white one that is in my living room now, rotated from the kitchen to make room for the Amana ME Range, so full of Corning Ware that it might fall through the floor one day.
 
I noticed the "St. Louis, 16, MO" address also.  I had no idea that this style of Nesco dated that far back. 

 

Did the cooking charts on the front of these come in different shades besides the smoky gold on the subject roaster and the silver blue like on mine?  Might they have indicated a model year or series, or was a choice of decorator colors always available?

 

Here's a picture of mine in use.  I forgot that I had to get a power cord for it, and since the receptacle is slightly smaller than those on a large roaster, I had to settle for a way older Eagle (likely from the woven fabric cord days) that was NOS from ebay.

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These started appearing in the 1920s-1930s, around the time that Roaster Ovens started appearing. These electric roasters or casseroles offered thermostatic cooking when many gas ranges, especially in apartments, did not have a thermostatically-controlled oven and heated up kitchens in summer for baking tasks that these could do either in the kitchen or outside on a porch.
 
Oh yes, I know these roasters have been around for almost 100 years.  My mom had one from around 1946.  I didn't hang onto it because even though it worked fine, it made a crackling sound on the bottom of the cooking well when initially turned on.  Plus, I just didn't use one of these things all that often.

 

These chrome-clad models looked newer to me than pre-ZIP Code, though. 
 
Interesting that Nathalie Dupree was involved with Rich's....there was a similar "local notable" who was the impresario for Pogue's (LS Ayres) cooking school in Cincinnati...her name escapes me but kitchen/epicure was the one area where buying responsibilities for the bigger (Pogues + Ayres + Stewart's) remained in Cincinnati for awhile after the merger (not moved immediately to Indianapolis)
 

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