Scraping the coconut was one of the toughest things done by my mom and grand mom in out kitchen as far as my observation goes from my childhood days. They used to cut it into small pieces and would peel it into tiny pieces. Sometime later, I remember my grand mom holding the coconut scraper with her feet and scraping the coconut into a plate underneath the scraper. Touch-wood, she must had a lot of patience and skill.
When I had been to Kerala, I came across a different type of coconut scraper. The abundant availability of the coconuts in Kerala needs no confirmation and the usage of coconut in their food items is understandable. They use coconut in almost every item, I think. Over there, in a house I saw the coconut scraper which was fixed permanently to the kitchen's rock base. They would use it and cover it with a small plastic cap in free time. There was nothing to rotate the scraping blade, rather the person who would want to scrap the coconut would have to rotate the coconut on top of the blade. Since the scraper was fixed to the kitchen base, it could not move! I tried my hand at it and then soon realised that it required a lot of skill and practice.
In Pune, once I had been to a shopping mall. While I was casually roaming in the steel utensils section, I saw a box with the image of a coconut scraper kind of thing. I opened the box and saw a dismantled one. I quickly asked the sales person there to show me how to use it. She assembled the parts and put it on the floor and told me that the handle will have to be rotated to scrap the coconut. I remembered a similar one which my grand ma used to hold with her feet. I asked the sales girl, how to hold it as it would move otherwise while rotating the handle. She struggled for a moment to figure out and finally we discovered the way to use it. There was a small black knob we saw on the right side of the based of the scraper. Once that's completely moved to the other side, as could also be seen in the picture here, the air underneath the scraper base would get evacuated and the rubber base would get stick to the floor and it will continue to hold the base to the floor unless and until the small black knob was moved back. How simple it felt! I immediately put it into my shopping trolley.
I've been using it since quite sometime now and it's very useful and mainly, its simple to use and clean. A very important product that every kitchen must have, except the kitchens in Kerala. For the whopping usage that they have, only the permanently fixed scrapers will be able to do the job for them. There have been many innovations which have made our lives easy going. This coconut scraper definitely one of them!
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