Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (9 page)

There is also the question of skill. I decided to try out Myhrvold’s theory on my own decidedly inferior gas burners (though at least the switches work most of the time, which is better than the stove in our old house). I took my smallest skillet and set it to heat on the largest burner to saute some sliced zucchini. The heat conduction was appreciably more even and powerful. The discs of zucchini practically jumped out of the pan. Then they burst into flames. Since then, I have happily returned to my imperfect mishmash of too-big pans and too-small burners. I’d rather put up with the annoyance of hot spots than suffer scorched eyebrows.

The ideal pan—like the ideal home—does not exist. Never mind. Pots have never been perfect, nor do they need to be. They are not just devices for boiling and sauteing, frying and stewing. They are part of the family. We get to know their foibles and their moods. We muddle through, juggling our good pots and our not-so-good ones. And in the end, supper arrives on the table; and we eat.

The poet with his pen, the artist with his brush,
the cook with his chopping knife.

F. T. CHENG, 1954

 

 

 

 

 

I
WAS MAKING A PILE OF CUCUMBER SANDWICHES ONE day when I sliced off a sliver of finger instead of cucumber. My injury was the result of getting overexcited with a Japanese mandolin slicer (newly acquired). “Lady with a mandolin,” they shouted with cheery nonchalance, when I arrived at the ER: clearly I was not the first idiot to hurt herself with this relatively obscure gadget. Many enthusiastic cooks have a mandolin permanently discarded in some neglected cupboard, spattered with dried blood. “Watch your fingers!” it said on the box, which should have given me a clue, but somehow the thrill of seeing a heap of transparent cucumber disks emerge distracted me, and before I knew it, there was a slice of myself on the wrong side of the blade, lying among the cucumber. It could have been worse. As I waited for the paramedics, I felt a stab of relief that I had put the mandolin on its thinnest setting.

Kitchens are places of violence. People get burned, scarred, frozen, and above all, cut. After the mandolin incident, I booked myself into a knife skills course, in a shiny new cooking school on the outskirts of town. Most of the men in the course had been given their enrollment as a present by wives and girlfriends, the assumption being that knives are the sort of thing men have fun with, like train sets or drills. They approached the chopping board with a slight swagger. The women stood more diffidently at first. We had without exception signed up for it ourselves, either as a treat (like yoga) or to get over some terror or anxiety around blades (like a self-defense class). I hoped it would teach me how to dice like a samurai, hack like a butcher, and annihilate an onion at ten paces like the chefs on TV In fact, most of the course was about safety: how to hold vegetables in a clawlike grip with our thumbs tucked under, keeping knuckles always against the body of the knife so that we couldn’t inadvertently baton our thumbs along with our carrots; how to steady the chopping board with a damp cloth; how to store our knives in a magnetic strip or in a plastic sheath. Our terror, it seemed, was justified. The teacher—a capable Swedish woman—warned us of the horrible accidents that ensue when sharp knives are carelessly left in a bowl of sudsy dishwashing detergent. You forget the knives are there, plunge your hand in, and slowly the water turns red, like a scene from
Jaws
.

Culinary knives have always been just a step away from weapons. These are tools designed to break, disfigure, and mutilate, even if all you are cutting is a carrot. Unlike lions, we lack the ability to tear meat from a carcass with our bare teeth; so we invented cutting tools to do the job for us. The knife is the oldest tool in the cook’s armory, older than the management of fire by somewhere between I million and 2 million years, depending on which anthropologist you believe. Cutting with some implement or other is the most basic way of processing
food. Knives do some of the work that feeble human teeth cannot. The earliest examples of stone cutting tools date back 2.6 million years to Ethiopia, where excavations have found both sharpened rocks and bones with cut-marks on them, indicating that raw meat was being hacked from the bone. Already, there was some sophistication in the knife skills on display. Stone Age humans fashioned numerous different cutting devices to suit their needs: archaeologists have identified simple sharp choppers, scrapers (both heavy duty and light duty), and hammerstones and spheroids for beating food. Even at this early stage, man was not randomly slashing at his food but making careful decisions about which cuts to make with which tools.

Unlike cooking, toolmaking is not an exclusively human activity. Chimpanzees and bonobos (another type of ape) have shown themselves capable of hammering rocks against other rocks to make sharp implements. Chimps can use stones to crack nuts and twigs to scoop fruit from a husk. Apes have also hammered stone flakes, but there is no evidence that they passed down toolmaking skills from one individual to another, as hominids did. Moreover, primates seem to be less sensitive to raw materials used than their human counterparts. Right from the beginning, hominid toolmakers were intensely interested in finding the best rocks for cutting, rather than just the most convenient, and were prepared to travel to get them. Which rock would make the sharpest flake? Stone Age toolmakers experimented with granite and quartz, obsidian and flint. Knife manufacturers still search for the best materials for a sharp blade; the difference is that the art of metallurgy, from the Bronze Age onward, has vastly expanded our options. From bronze to iron; from iron to steel; from steel to carbon steel, high-carbon steel, and stainless steel; and on to fancy titanium and laminates. You can now spend vast sums on a Japanese chef’s knife, handmade by a master cutler from molybdenum-vanadium-enriched steel. Such a knife can perform feats that would have amazed Stone Age man, swooshing through a pumpkin’s hard skin as if it were a soft pear.

In my experience, when you ask chefs what their favorite kitchen gadget is, nine times out of ten, they will say a knife. They say it slightly impatiently, because it’s just so obvious: the foundation of every great meal is accurate cutting. A chef without a knife would be like a hairdresser without scissors. Knife work—more than the application of heat—is simply what chefs do: using a sharp edge to convert ingredients into something you can cook with. Different chefs go for different knives: a curved scimitar; a straight French “blooding” knife, designed for use by horsemeat butchers; a pointy German slicer; a cleaver. I met one chef who said he used a large serrated bread knife for absolutely everything. He liked the fact that he didn’t have to sharpen it. Others favor tiny parers that dissect food with needle-sharp accuracy. Most rely on the classic chef’s knife, either nine-inch or ten-inch, because it’s about the right size to cover most needs: long enough for jointing, small enough for filleting. A good chef steels his or her knives several times in a single shift, drawing the blade swiftly to and fro at a 20° angle, to ensure the knife never loses its bite.

The story of knives and food is not only about cutting tools getting ever sharper and stronger, however. It is also about how we manage the alarming violence of these utensils. Our Stone Age ancestors took the materials at their disposal and—so far as we can surmise—made them as sharp as possible. But as the technology of knife making developed through iron and steel, the sharpest knife became something casually lethal. The primary function of a knife is to cut; but the secondary question has always been how to tame the knife’s cutting power. The Chinese did it by confining their knife work to the kitchen, reducing food to bite-sized pieces with a massive cleaverlike instrument, out of sight. Europeans did it, first, by creating elaborate rules about the use of the knife at the table—the subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you—and second, by inventing “table knives”
so blunt and feeble that you would struggle to use them to cut people instead of food.

 

T
here is a peculiar joy in holding a knife that feels just right for your hand and marveling as it dices an onion, almost without effort on your part. During the knife-skills course, our teacher showed us how to joint a chicken. When separating the legs from the thighs, you look for two little mountain tops; on hitting the right spot, the knife goes through like silk. This only works, however, when the knife is sharp enough to begin with.

Chefs always say that the safest knife is the sharpest one (which is true until you actually have an accident). Among domestic cooks, though, knowledge of how to keep a knife sharp has become a private passion rather than a universal skill. The travelling Victorian knife grinder, who could sharpen a set of knives in a matter of minutes—in exchange for whatever you could pay him, pennies or even a pint of ale—is long gone.
²
He has been replaced by eager knife enthusiasts, who grind their knives not as a job or even out of necessity but for the sheer satisfaction of it, swapping tips in online knife forums. Opinion differs as to which sharpening device is best for achieving the perfect edge, whether a Japanese water stone, a traditional whetstone, an Arkansas stone, or a synthetic aluminium oxide stone. (I know of no real knife enthusiast who would favor the electric knife sharpener, which is generally excoriated for aggressively oversharpening, and hence ruining, good knives.)