The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t. So much of what we believe about utensils is determined by culture, but cultural values are not fixed and eternal. From the seventeenth century onward, there was a great upheaval in European attitudes toward knives. The first change was that knives started to be pre-laid on the table, joined by that newfangled implement, the fork. This divested knives of their former magic. Rather than being specially tailored to an individual owner, cases of identical knives were now bought and sold by the dozen and laid out impersonally for whomever happened to sit down. The second change was that table knives ceased being sharp. They were thus divested of their power, too. The raison d’être of knives is to cut. It takes a civilization in an advanced state of politesse—or passive aggression—to devise
on purpose
a knife that does a worse job of cutting. In more ways than one, we are still living with the consequences of this change today.
I
n 1637, Cardinal Richelieu, chief adviser to King Louis XIII of France, is supposed to have witnessed a dinner guest using the sharp tip of a double-edged knife to pick his teeth. This act so appalled the cardinal—whether because of the danger or the vulgarity is not entirely clear—that he ordered all his own knives to be made blunt, starting a new fashion. Until that time, eating knives tended to be sharpened on both sides of the blade, like a dagger. No more. In 1669, cutlers were forbidden by the next king, Louis XIV, from forging pointed dinner knives in France. Richelieu’s mandate against double-edged knives went along with a transformation of table manners and
table implements. Europe underwent what the great sociologist Norbert Elias called the “Civilising process.” Patterns of behavior at the dining table changed markedly. Old certainties were crumbling. The Catholic Church had lost its former unity, and the chivalric codes of behavior were long gone. People suddenly felt revolted by ways of eating that had once been acceptable: taking meat from a common dish using fingers, drinking soups straight from the bowl, and using a single sharp knife to cut everything. All these things—which were once entirely in keeping with courtly manners—now felt uncivilized. Europeans now shared the Chinese wariness of sharp knives at the table. Unlike the Chinese, Westerners kept knives for eating but disabled them in various ways.
In France, knives were often kept off the table, except for certain specific tasks such as peeling and cutting fruit, for which personal sharp knives were produced, as in the old days. English knives stayed on the table but became significantly blunter. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English table knives look like miniature kitchen knives. The shape of the blade may vary, from daggerlike to penknife straight to scimitar-bladed. Sometimes the blade is double-edged, sometimes single-edged. But the knives all have this in common: they are sharp (or at least they would have been when they were shiny and new).
Eighteenth-century table knives look completely different from those of the previous century. Suddenly, they are ostentatiously blunt. The blade often curves gently toward the right, finishing in a thoroughly rounded tip. It is a shape we now associate with butter knives-and with good reason. The table knife had ceased to be a very effective cutting device. It was now an ineffectual utensil, only good for spreading butter, placing things on the fork, or subdividing food that was already relatively soft.
The new toothless table knife also led to a change in the way knives were held. Previously, a knife might be grasped with the whole hand in a stabbing pose. Now, the index finger was poised delicately along the top of the—newly blunt—spine with the palm of
the hand wrapped round the handle. This is still the polite way to hold a table knife. It is one of the reasons so many of us have bad knife skills. We use the same grip on sharp knives as table knives, which is disastrous. When holding a kitchen knife, you should never rest your index finger along the spine—there’s far more danger of cutting yourself than when you robustly grip the bottom of the blade with thumb on one side and forefinger on the other. A good training in table manners—which teach constant diffidence around sharpness—is bad training for the kitchen.
By the eighteenth century, polite Westerners sat at the dinner table delicately holding their pretty little knives, trying to avoid at all cost any gesture reminiscent of violence or menace. As a cutting technology, the table knife was now more or less redundant. By the late eighteenth century, the celebrated Sheffield table knife from the north of England, though still made of top-notch steel, had become less about cutting and more about display. In London society, these were beautiful objects, laid out on the table as marks of a host’s good taste and wealth. It would be easy to write off table knives as technologically obsolete in the modern era. The uselessness of table knives is shown by the appearance of sharp, serrated steak knives (pioneered in the southern French town of Laguiole), whose presence acts as a kind of rebuke to normal knives: what steak knives say is that when you actually need to cut something at the table, a table knife won’t do.
The table knife was now an entirely separate object from the knife as weapon. There was no need to carry a knife with you; indeed, to do so could be considered poor form, in Britain at any rate. In 1769, an Italian man of letters, Joseph Baretti, was indicted for stabbing a man in self-defense in London, using a small folding fruit knife. Baretti’s defense was that it was common practice on the Continent to carry a sharp knife for cutting apples, pears, and sweetmeats. The fact that he had to explain this in such detail to a British court was a sign of how the nature of knives had changed in Britain by 1769. Sharpness was no longer seen as necessary or even desirable in a table knife. In this, Britain was leading the way.
There is more to table knives than sharpness, however. There is also the question of how they make food more pleasurable to eat—or not. From this perspective, for most people, table knives really only came into their own in the twentieth century, with the advent of stainless steel.
I said earlier that the carbon steel favored by Sheffield cutlers was a far better metal for forging blades than previous alternatives. What I didn’t mention was this: the downside of carbon steel, like iron, is that it can make certain foods taste disgusting. Anything acidic has a potentially disastrous effect on non-stainless steel. “Upon the slightest touch of vinegar,” wrote the great American etiquette expert Emily Post, steel-bladed knives turned “black as ink.” Vinaigrette and steel knives were a particularly bad combination, hence the French prejudice, that persists to this day, against cutting salad leaves.
Another problem was fish. For centuries, people have found lemon to be the ideal accompaniment to fish. But until the 1920s, and the invention of stainless steel, the taste of lemony fish was liable to be ruined by the tang of blade metal from the knife. The acid in the lemon reacted with the steel, leaving a foul metallic aftertaste that entirely overpowered the delicate flesh of the fish. This explains the production of fish knives made of silver in the nineteenth century. Nowadays, these seem a pointless affectation. In fact, fish knives were a mainly practical invention, albeit one that only the rich could afford. Unlike normal steel knives, silver knives were noncorrosive and did not react with the lemon juice on the plate. The signature scalloped shape was firstly a way to distinguish them in the cutlery drawer (as well as signaling the fact that fish, unlike meat, was not tough and did not need to be sawed at). If you had no silver fish knives, the only other option was to eat fish with two forks, or a single fork and a piece of bread, or suffer the taste of corroded steel.
So, the launch of stainless steel in the twentieth century ranks as one of the greatest additions to happiness at the table. Once it
entered cheap mass production after World War II, it placed stylish, shiny cutlery within the reach of most budgets and removed at a stroke all those fears about knives making food taste funny. Never again would you have to worry when you squirted a lemon over a piece of cod or feel that you mustn’t use a knife to cut dressed salad.
Stainless steel (otherwise known as inox steel or nonrusting steel) is a metal alloy with a high chromium content. The chromium in the metal forms an invisible layer of chromium oxide when exposed to the air, which is what enables stainless steel to remain resistant to corrosion and also splendidly lustrous. It was only in the early years of the twentieth century that a successful stainless steel—strong and tensile enough as well as corrosion resistant—was made. In 1908, Friedrich Krupp built a 366-ton yacht—
Germania
—with a chrome-steel hull. Meanwhile, in Sheffield, Harry Brearley of Thomas Firth and Sons had discovered a stainless steel alloy while trying to find a corrosion-resistant metal for making gun barrels. Noncorrosive cutlery was a happy by-product of the search for military advantage between Britain and Germany on the road to total war. At first, the new metal was hard to work in all but the simplest cutlery patterns; it took the industrial innovations of World War II for stainless steel knives to become something that could be worked efficiently and cheaply in the shapes people desired. Stainless steel was another step in domesticating the knife, in rendering it cheaper, more accessible, and less threatening than the knives our ancestors carried around on their person.
The Western table knife now seems an altogether harmless object (though they were still thought menacing enough to have been banned from planes in the wake of 9/11 ). Our preference for these blunt implements over the past two hundred years has had powerful unseen consequences, however.
Knives do not just leave their mark on food. They leave it on the human body Every chef has scars to show, and often does so proudly, giving you the story behind each wound. Hack marks on a thumb from paring vegetables; the missing chunk of finger from an
unfortunate encounter with a turbot. My finger still bulges tenderly where the mandolin sliced it. Then there are the blisters and calluses that chefs acquire, which appear without any accidents or mistakes, just through the action of good knife work. Blisters and gashes are the most obvious legacy of the kitchen knife, but the marks the knife has left on our bodies go further still. The basic technology of cutting food at the table has shaped our very physiology, and above all, our teeth.
M
uch of the science of modern orthodontics is devoted to creating—through rubber bands, wires, and braces—the perfect “overbite.” An overbite refers to the way our top layer of incisors hangs over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box. This is the ideal human occlusion. The opposite of an overbite is the “edge-to-edge” bite seen in primates such as chimpanzees, where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.
What the orthodontists don’t tell you is that the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives. Based on surviving skeletons, this has only been the “normal” alignment of the human jaw for 200 to 250 years in the Western world. Before that, most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, comparable to apes. The overbite is not a product of evolution—the time frame is far too short. Rather, it seems likely to be a response to the way we cut our food during our formative years. The person who worked this out is Professor Charles Loring Brace (born 1930), a remarkable American anthropologist whose main intellectual passion was Neanderthal man. Over decades, Brace built up the world’s largest database on the evolution of hominid teeth. He possibly held more ancient human jaws in his hand than anyone else in the twentieth century.
As early as the 1960s, Brace had been aware that the overbite needed explaining. Initially, he assumed that it went back to the “adoption of agriculture six or seven thousand years ago.” Intuitively, it would make sense if the overbite corresponded to the adoption of
grain, because cereal potentially requires a lot less chewing than the grainy meat and fibrous tubers and roots of earlier times. But as his tooth database grew, Brace found that the edge-to-edge bite persisted much longer than anyone had previously assumed. In Western Europe, Brace found, the change to the overbite occurred only in the late eighteenth century, starting with “high status individuals.”
Why? There was no drastic alteration in the nutritional components of a high-status diet at this time. The rich continued to eat large amounts of protein-rich meat and fish, copious pastries, modest quantities of vegetables, and about the same amount of bread as the poor. Admittedly, the rich in 1800 would expect their meat to come with different seasonings and sauces than in 1500: fewer currants, spices, and sugar, but more butter, herbs, and lemon. Cooking styles certainly evolved. But most of these changes in cuisine long predated the emergence of the overbite. The fresher, lighter nouvelle cuisine that appeared on tables across Europe during the Renaissance goes back at least as far as 1651, with the French cookbook by La Varenne called
Le Cuisinier françois;
arguably, it goes back still further, to the Italian chef Maestro Martino in the 1460s, whose recipes included herb frittata, venison pie, parmesan custard, and fried sole with orange juice and parsley, all things that would not have looked out of place at wealthy dinners three hundred years later. At the time that aristocratic teeth started to change, the substance of a high-class diet had not radically altered in several hundred years.
What changed most substantially by the late eighteenth century was not
what
was eaten but
how
it was eaten. This marked the time when it became normal in upper- and middle-class circles to eat with a table knife and fork, cutting food into little pieces before it was eaten. This might seem a question of custom rather than of technological change, and to some extent it was. After all, the mechanics of the knife itself were hardly new. Over millennia, people have devised countless artificial cutting implements to make our food easier for our teeth to manage. We have hacked, sawed, carved, minced, tenderized, diced, julienned. The Stone Age mastery of cutting tools
seems to have been one of the factors leading to the smaller jaws and teeth of modern man, as compared with our hominid ancestors. But it was only 200 to 250 years ago, with the adoption of the knife and fork at the dining table, that the overbite emerged.