Kitchen gadgets are an unavoidable part of a cook’s life. A prowl through any kitchen would most likely yield at least a few cooking tools that fit the definition of a gadget. Treasured tools, family hand-me-downs, impractical implements, gifts that made sense to the giver, are all things that can reside in kitchen drawers.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a gadget as, “an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty.” This explains the category of kitchen gadgets very well: small enough to fit in a kitchen drawer or cabinet, often with moving parts, occasionally with digital displays, all intended to ease a cooking task with an innovative and not-always-simple solution to a perceived problem.

Gadgets are in a separate category from kitchen tools. A set of sturdy well made measuring cups is an essential kitchen tool. An adjustable measuring cup with a sliding end that changes the size and a scale on the side to show the points of various measurements is a gadget – and not a particularly helpful one.

A tour of our kitchen yields a few gadgets, even though we have had several purges over the years to banish useless, impractical or just plain silly contraptions. There is a plastic “spoon” for separating eggs – yolk from white. It looks good and seems like it might work, but using your hands is much faster and easier–let the white slip through your fingers while passing the yolk back and forth. We have a beloved potato ricer that belonged to my Grandmother Evans, with some spots of rust and loose hinges, big and clunky by today’s standards, but the mashed potatoes taste better from this heirloom gadget. There was a gift of rings for rolling pie crust – a set of plastic hoops to corral dough to a consistent thickness in a perfect circle – long since departed. We had a favorite two-part gadget for shaking eggs to blend them for scrambling or mixing a little vinaigrette. It broke, and a replacement can’t be found.

Catalogs and their websites are great sources for gadgets. Williams-Sonoma, The Pampered Chef, and the Chef’s Catalog are all packed with tempting implements. You’ll find things like a multi-purpose slicer, meatball tongs, garlic keepers, egg toppers, an avocado cuber, a cutting board with a holder for your iPad, can strainers, collapsible bowls, or a corn butterer. Some of these seem like good gadgets, but the question is, will they morph into real kitchen tools? Some will and some, I think, probably won’t.

But the ultimate source of gadgets is late night TV. Who has not secretly craved a Veg-o-matic, food saver, pasta strainer, food storage system or even a George Forman Grill? Ron Popiel is the grandfather of the gadget infomercial, bringing us both the Veg-o-matic and the phrase, “But wait, there’s more!” The “As Seen on TV” section of any store is a reliable source of kitchen gadgets, some of questionable utility.

Alton Brown, host of Good Eats and Iron Chef on the Food Network, is well known for insisting that every tool in his kitchen arsenal perform many tasks. No uni-tasker gadgets for him. He famously uses a pizza cutting wheel for a range of cutting tasks, cooks almost anything including roast chicken and flat bread on a panini grill (must be messy), and fries bacon on a waffle iron.

Every cook needs functional high quality tools. But when does a gadget cross the line and become a tool? Good tools perform a range of tasks, function well, are easy to maintain and practical to use. Gadgets often try to make a difficult task easy through the application of technology. Sometimes this works – a good candy thermometer (a gadget when introduced) is easier and more accurate that the old soft-ball/hard-ball candy-making measurements. I would say that this one moved categories from gadget to tool.

More often the gadget fails or is replaced by the cook’s increasing expertise. Do you need a device that will peel and core a pineapple with one (very hard) push (if the pineapple is just the right shape and size), or are you better off with a sharp knife and a few minutes of cutting and slicing? A gadget to core and wedge an apple in one cut seems unnecessary to me, but an old fashioned crank peeler-corer-slicer is an essential and effective tool for anyone who bakes a lot of apple desserts. We wouldn’t make our Apple Crisp without one!

There are a lot of wine bottle opening tools to choose from, some with double handles, the rabbit type for opening a lot of wine in a hurry, those using pressurized gas to push the cork out, and electric models that purport to remove all human effort. None as effective as a simple and inexpensive waiter’s folding corkscrew. This is a category where gadgets have run wild.

Every cook has favorite kitchen implements – maybe they’re gadgets, maybe not. Gadgets have tremendous appeal, bring technology to bear, offer new and easier ways to get tasks done, and help cooks to be more efficient. Some get the job done, but most, I think, end up in the cluttered gizmo graveyard at the back of the utensil drawer.