Nutbrown Sandwich Toaster

“A Meal in a minute for every occasion. In the home. In the office. In the county. In emergency.” In the office gets me. I can just picture pulling out the spread and hot plate and toasting up a quick lunch in the office.

The Nutbrown Sandwich Toaster is a classic short-handled pie iron, produced in England from 1953 to the early 1970s, for toasties, as they are known in England.

Before electric sandwich makers and plug-in appliances became available for the average home cook, Nutbrown patented and produced a stamped-metal handheld sandwich toaster, British patent number 690233. My collection has a rare, 1953 early production version without a patent number and mint-green handles.

During the post-war era of the 1950s, Britain’s "age of austerity"was defined by strict rationing and crippling shortages of energy and raw materials. As such, rather than using the energy-hungry process of cast-aluminum production, Nutbrown used stamped metal which requires fewer raw materials and less electricity.

The manufacturer, Thomas M. Nutbrown Ltd., was founded in 1927 in Blackpool, England. The company specialized in creative and practical kitchen gadgets, exporting unique housewares worldwide. The sandwich toaster was popular and heavily sold in countries with strong cultural ties to Britain, particularly Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. They also were exported to the United States and Canada, which is why vintage models are regularly found today at estate sales and thrift shops.

There are two versions of the Nutbrown assembly: curved rod and rivets.

The rivets version features a traditional, multi-point fixed metal hinge attached with rivets on the tops of the cups. It offers a rigid alignment that forces the top and bottom plates to meet squarely. While durable, it can be a bit more stubborn to snap locked if your sandwich is overfilled.

While simple to manufacture, this method created structural weaknesses. Over time, flipping the iron over high stove heat caused the rivets to expand, loosen, or snap under the mechanical pressure of clamping thick sandwiches. It also left small crevices on the outside that trapped carbonized grease.

To solve the rivet issue, Nutbrown completely redesigned the frame. Instead of using separate rivets, the two metal handle rods were engineered to extend all the way to the toaster cups, curving smoothly into an integrated loop or cradle that hugs the circular rim of the metal cups. The curved rod provides a slight amount of physical play bringing the two sides together. This allows the toaster to accommodate thicker slices of bread or extra fillings, before you clamp down the lock.

There are also two version of the locking mechanism. One locks on the end of the handle and the other clamps on the rod.

Though the same British patent number remained stamped on every model over the years, the visual aesthetics changed with the decades. The earliest models, built between 1955 and 1959, are easily identified by their natural and painted wood handles. They came with iconic 1950s kitchen shades such as mint green, deep red, bright yellow, or cream.

In the 1960s the colors transitioned into vivid, saturated mid-century hues like turquoise, sky blue, candy-apple red, and primary yellow.

By the end of the 1960s, the vibrant shades of the previous decades were retired for earth tones, featuring dark brown, deep orange, avocado green, or black. The metal quality often feels lighter, moving away from heavy chrome-plated finishes toward lightweight pressed aluminum.

By the late 1960s, injection-molded plastics became the cheaper, more modern standard for consumer housewares, replacing labor-intensive turned and painted wood. This was the last generation of the Nutbrown Sandwich Toaster. Production ceased sometime in the early 1970s.

Many iterations featured Nutbrown's trademark “two-hoop” look: a colored handle segmented by two contrasting silver-painted or aluminum bands. While highly aesthetic, the hoops served a practical engineering purpose. Many mid-century utensils featured a metal tang (the end of a tool's functional metal head) that was driven directly into a wooden handle. Over time, the pressure of mashing, whisking, or rolling could cause the wood to split. The two metal hoops acted as ferrule bands, tightly binding the wood to compress it, absorb mechanical stress, and prevent splitting.

There were also many copycat versions sold under a variety of names, that came out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. These had unfinished wood handles and a thin stamped-metal.