Saladmaster Disaster

When Renae, a graduate student that both my wife and I had taught, repeatedly begged us to attend a fried-chicken-dinner Saladmaster sales pitch at her apartment, we finally relented. We’d get a free meal with no obligations, and she would get some free knives as a hostess gift—an unbeatable deal for everybody, Renae said.

Renae, her husband, and four children lived in an efficiency apartment. Right away I felt good that we were helping her family get those much-needed utensils. The kitchen was tiny—about the area of a king-sized bed. In the bed with us were three other customer couples (all strangers), the eight folding chairs we sat on, our cook, his wife, and of course the stove. Once the stove was going, the bed got pretty hot.

When our cook/Saladmaster salesman began his hour-long infomercial, it dawned on me that I should have done more research The name “Saladmaster” had made me think we’d be asked to buy a plastic salad spinner, maybe a $20 item, or perhaps a food processor for shredding lettuce that would cost no more than a hundred bucks. But Saladmaster was actually a company that sold premium quality pot and pan sets costing in the neighborhood of 700 to a thousand dollars—a neighborhood I didn’t visit too often. I started feeling anxious and claustrophobic.

I don’t think our cook literally had that perspiring disease, but as the cooking progressed, his forehead got sweatier and sweatier. Meanwhile, his silent assistant-wife did a semi-convincing job of appearing semi-cheerful.

Since Saladmaster pans were double-walled stainless steel, much of the sales strategy was to convince us just how awful the cheaper pans we probably owned were. Aluminum pans were especially targeted. Saladmaster Man heated some water in an old dented, stained, pock-marked aluminum sauce pan, let it cool, then passed it around with a tablespoon and directed us to see for ourselves just how horribly the aluminum contaminated the taste. I watched as my wife dipped the spoon, brought it to her lips, made a face, and then passed to me. I have to admit that SM Man was right: the water did taste metallic, bitter, and foul. Later, when I asked the woman who took me for better or worse (I think you can probably tell which she got)—when I asked her about the taste, she said, “I didn’t drink it; I just pretended. Did you actually drink it? You idiot, why would you do that?”

After the meal, we had to wait our turns to be pressured as individual couples in a closed-door room. My wife and I were the last couple, and SM Man was in a bad mood from the start. I told him that I was glad to hear such good things about double-walled stainless steel cookware since my parents had given us a set of Belgique only the Christmas before. Our host said he’d never heard of Belgique. My wife and I felt sorry for him, so we offered to buy a chef’s knife we didn’t need, but the pitchman, maybe out of disgust or a sense of defeat, seemed uninterested in such a small sale.

Later, Renae told us that none of the four couples had bought anything and that the Saladmaster Man had refused to give Renae even the minimum guaranteed hostess gift on the grounds that one of the couples wasn’t married.

So nobody got anything they wanted. Except me: I got an absolutely free, unforgettable meal in cramped, hot quarters among stranger bedfellows and a sweaty, desperate host—a free two-course dinner of piping-hot, delicious big helpings of bad feelings and guilt.