Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (10 page)

Whichever tool is chosen, the basic principle is always the same. You sharpen a knife by grinding off some of the metal, starting with a coarse abrasive and moving to a finer one until you have the required sharpness. In addition, you may wish to steel your blade each time you use it, running it along a steel rod a few times
to realign the edge. Steeling can keep a sharp knife sharp, but it cannot make a blunt knife sharp in the first place. What does it mean for a knife to be sharp? It is a question of angle. You get a sharp edge when two surfaces—known as bevels—come together at a thin V-shaped angle. If you could take a cross section through a sharp knife, you would see that the typical angle for a Western kitchen knife is around 20°, or one-eighteenth of a circle. European knives are generally double-beveled, that is, sharpened on both sides of the blade, resulting in a total angle of 40°. Every time you use your knife, a little of the edge wears away, and the angle is gradually lost. Sharpeners renew the edge by grinding bits of the metal away from both sides of the V to restore the original angle. With heavy use and excessive grinding, the blade gradually diminishes.

In an ideal universe, a knife would be able to achieve an angle of zero—representing infinite sharpness. But some concessions have to be made to reality. Thin-angled knives cut better—like razors—but if they are too thin, they will be too fragile to withstand the act of chopping, which rather defeats the purpose. Whereas Western kitchen knives sharpen at an angle of around 20°, Japanese ones, which are thinner, can sharpen at around 15°. This is one of the reasons so many chefs prefer Japanese knives.

There is much that the community of knife enthusiasts disagree upon. Is the best knife large? There’s a theory that heavier knives do more of the work for you. Or small? There’s another theory that heavy knives make your muscles ache. Are you better off with a flat edge or a curved one? The enthusiasts also disagree on the best way to test the sharpness of an edge to see if it “bites.” Should you use your thumb—thus flaunting how at-one you are with the metal—or is it better to cut into a random vegetable or a ballpoint pen? There’s a joke about a man who tested his blade using his tongue: sharp blades taste like metal; really sharp blades taste like blood.

What unites knife enthusiasts is the shared knowledge that having a sharp knife, and mastery of it, is the greatest power you will ever feel in a kitchen.

Shamefully late in my cooking life, I have discovered why most chefs think the knife is the one indispensable tool. You no longer feel anxious around onions or bagels. You look at food and see that you can cut it down to any size you want. Your cooking takes on a new refinement. An accurately chopped onion—tiny dice, with no errant larger chunks—lends a suave luxury to a risotto, because the onion and the grains of rice meld harmoniously A sharp bread knife creates the possibility of elegantly thin toast. Become the boss of a sharp knife, and you are the boss of the whole kitchen.

This shouldn’t really come as a revelation. But proficiency with a knife is now a minority enthusiasm. Even many otherwise accomplished cooks have a rack stocked with dull knives. I know, because I used to be one of them. You can survive perfectly well in the modern kitchen without any survivalist knife skills. When something needs to be really finely chopped or shredded, a food processor will pick up the slack. We are not in the Stone Age (as much as some of the knife enthusiasts would like us to be). Our food system enables us to feed ourselves even when we lack the most rudimentary cutting abilities, never mind the ability to make our own slicing tools. Bread comes pre-sliced, and vegetables can be bought pre-diced. Once, though, effective handling of a knife was a more basic and necessary skill than either reading or writing.

 

I
n medieval and Renaissance Europe, you carried your own knife everywhere with you and brought it out at mealtimes when you needed to. Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt. The knife at a man’s girdle could equally well be used for chopping food or defending himself against enemies. Your knife was as much a garment—like a wristwatch now—as a tool. A knife was a universal possession, often your most treasured one. Like a wizard’s wand in
Harry Potter
, the knife was tailored to its owner. Knife handles were made of brass, ivory, rock crystal, glass, and shell; of amber, agate, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. They might be carved or engraved with images of babies, apostles, flowers,
peasants, feathers, or doves. You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush. You wore your knife so habitually that—as with a watch—you might start to regard it as a part of yourself and forget it was there. A sixth-century text (St. Benedict’s Rule) reminded monks to detach their knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didn’t cut themselves in the night.

There was a serious danger of this because knives then, with their daggerlike shape, really were sharp. They needed to be, because they might be called upon to tackle everything from rubbery cheese to a crusty loaf. Aside from clothes, a knife was the one possession every adult needed. It has been often assumed, wrongly, that knives, as violent objects, were exclusively masculine. But women wore them, too. A painting from 164° by H. H. Kluber depicts a rich Swiss family, preparing to eat a meal of meat, bread, and apples. The daughters of the family have flowers in their hair, and dangling from their red dresses are silvery knives, attached to silken ropes tied around their waists. With a knife this close to your body at all times, you would have been very familiar with its construction.

Sharp knives have a certain anatomy. At the tip of the blade is the point, the spikiest part, good for skewering or piercing. You might use a knife’s point to slash pastry, flick seeds from a lemon half, or spear a boiled potato to check if it is done. The main body of the blade—the lower cutting edge—is known as the belly, or the curve. This is the part of a knife that does most of the work, from shredding greens into a fine tangle to slicing meat thinly. Turn it on its side and you can use it to pulverize garlic to a paste with coarse salt: good-bye, garlic press! The opposite end of the blade from the belly, logically enough, is the spine, the blunt top edge that does no cutting but adds weight and balance. The thick, sharp part of the blade next to the handle is the heel, good for hefty chopping of hard things like nuts and cabbages. The blade then gives way to the tang, the piece of metal hidden inside the handle that joins the knife and its handle together. A tang may be partial—if it only extends partway into the handle—or it may
be full. In many high-end Japanese knives now, there is no tang, the whole knife, handle and all, being formed from a single piece of steel. Where the handle meets the blade is called the return. At the bottom of the handle is the butt—the very end of the knife.

When you start to love knives, you come to appreciate everything from the quality of the rivets on the handle to the line of the heel. These are now fairly arcane thrills, but once, they belonged to everyone. A good knife was an object of pride. As you took it from your waist, the familiar handle, worn and polished from use, would ease nicely into your hand as you sliced your bread, speared your meat, or pared your apple. You knew the value of a sharp knife, because without it you would find it so much harder to eat much of what was on the table. And you knew that sharpness meant steel, which by the sixteenth century was already the metal most valued by knife makers.

 

T
he first metal knives were made of bronze during the Bronze Age (c. 3000—700 BC). They looked similar to modern knives in that as well as a cutting edge, they had a tang and bolster, onto which a handle could be fitted. But the cutting edge didn’t function well because bronze is a terrible material for blades, too soft to hold a really sharp edge. Proof that bronze does not make good knives is confirmed by the fact that during the Bronze Age, cutting devices continued to be made from stone, which was, in many respects, superior to the newfangled metal.

Iron made better knife metal than bronze. The Iron Age was the first great knife age, when the flint blades that had been in use since the time of the Oldowans finally vanished. As a harder metal, iron could be honed far sharper than bronze. It was a handy metal for forging large, heavy tools. Iron Age smiths made pretty decent axes. For knives, however, iron was not ideal. Although harder than bronze, iron rusts easily, making food taste bad. And iron knives still do not hold the sharpest of edges.

The great step forward was steel, which is still, in one form or other, the material from which almost all sharp knives are made, the
exception being the new ceramic knives, which have been described as the biggest innovation in blade material for three millennia. Ceramic knives cut like a dream through soft fish fillets or yielding tomatoes but are far too fragile for heavy chopping. For a blade that is sharp, hard enough, and strong, nothing has yet supplanted steel, which can form and hold a sharp edge better than other metals.

Steel is no more than iron with a tiny proportion of added carbon: around 0.2 percent to 2 percent by weight. But that tiny bit makes all the difference. The carbon in steel is what makes it hard enough to hold a really sharp angle, but not so hard it can’t be sharpened. If too much carbon is added, the steel will be brittle and snap under pressure. For most food cutting, 0.75 percent carbon is right: this creates a “sheer steel” capable of being forged into chopping knives with a tough, sharp edge, easy to sharpen, without being easily breakable; the kind of knife that could cut almost anything.

By the eighteenth century, methods of making carbon steel had industrialized, and this marvelous substance was being used to make a range of increasingly specialized tools. The cutlery trade was no longer about making a daggerlike personal possession for a single individual. It was about making a range of knives for highly specific uses: filleting knives, paring knives, pastry knives, all from steel.

These specialized knives were both cause and consequence of European ways of dining. It has often been observed that the French haute cuisine that dominated wealthy European tastes from the eighteenth century on was a cuisine of sauces: bechamel, velouté, espagnole, allemande (the four mother sauces of Carême, later revised as the five mother sauces of Escoffier, who ditched the allemande and added hollandaise and tomato sauce). True, but it was no less a cuisine of specialist knives and precision cutting. The French were not the first to use particular knives for particular tasks. As with much of French cuisine, their multitude of knives can be traced to Italy in the sixteenth century. In 1570, Bartolomeo Scappi, Italian cook to the pope, had myriad kitchen weapons at his disposal: scimitars for
dismembering, thick-bladed knives for battering, blunt-ended pasta knives, and cake knives, which were long, thin scrapers. Yet Scappi laid down no exact code about how to use these blades. “Then beat it with knives,” Scappi will say, or “cut into slices.” Again, he does not formally catalog different cutting techniques. It was the French, who, with their passion for Cartesian exactness, made knife work into a system, a rule book, and a religion. The cutlery firm Sabatier first produced carbon steel knives in the town of Thiers in the early 1800s—around the time that gastronomy as a concept was invented, through the writings of Grimod de la Reyniere and Joseph Berchoux and the cooking of Carême. The knives and the cuisine went hand in hand. Wherever French chefs traveled, they brought with them a series of strict cuts—mince, chiffonade, julienne—and the knives with which to make them.

French food, no matter how simple, has meticulous knife work behind it. A platter of raw oysters on the half shell at a Parisian restaurant doesn’t look like cooking at all, but what makes it a pleasure to eat, apart from freshness, is that someone has skillfully opened each mollusk with an oyster shucker, sliding the knife upward to cut the adductor muscle that holds the shell closed without smashing off any sharp pieces. As for the shallot vinegar with which the oysters are served, someone has had to work like crazy, cutting the shallot into brunoise: tiny 0.25 cm cubes. It is only this prepping that prevents the shallot from being too overwhelming against the bland, saline oysters.

The savory French steak that sits before you so invitingly—whether onglet, pave, or entrecote—is the result of French butchery using particular utensils: a massive cleaver for the most brutal bone-hacking work, a delicate butcher’s knife for seaming out the more elusive cuts, and perhaps a cutlet basher (
batte à côtelettes
) to flatten the meat a little before it is cooked. The classical French kitchen
includes ham knives and cheese knives, knives for julienning, and beak-shaped knives for dealing with chestnuts.

Professional haute cuisine was founded on specialism. The great chef Escoffier, who laid the foundation for all modern French restaurant cooking, organized the kitchen into separate stations for sauces, meats, pastries. Each of these units had its own persnickety knives. In a kitchen organized on Escoffier principles, one person might be given the job of “turning” potatoes into perfect little spheres. For this task, he would use a tournet knife, a small parer with a blade like a bird’s beak. This curved blade would be awkward for cutting on a board—the angle is all wrong. Yet that arc is just right for swiping the skin off a handheld round object, following its contours to leave an aesthetically pleasing little globe. A garnish of turned vegetables—so pretty, so whimsical, so unmistakably French—is the direct result of a certain knife, wielded in a certain way, guided by a certain philosophy about what food should be.