by Tim Hayward
First published in 2016 by
Quadrille Publishing
Pentagon House
52–54 Southwark Street
London SE1 1UN
www.quadrille.co.uk
Quadrille is an imprint of Hardie Grant
www.hardiegrant.com.au
Text © Tim Hayward 2016
Photography © Chris Terry 2016
Illustrations © Chie Kutsuwada 2016
Cover illustration and knife illustrations © Will Webb 2016
Design and layout © Quadrille Publishing 2016
The rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the publisher.
Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN: 978 184949 9361
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
INTRODUCTION
ANATOMY OF THE KNIFE
ON GRIP
KNIFE STROKES
ON MATERIALS
ON MAKING A KNIFE
ON KNIFEMAKERS
THE KNIVES
WESTERN KNIVES
CHINESE KNIVES
JAPANESE KNIVES
WORKING KNIVES
SPECIALISED KNIVES
SHARPNESS
KNIFE ACCESSORIES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
THERE IS NO OBJECT YOU OWN that is anything like your kitchen knife. Every day you pick it up and use it to create and transform. This, I suppose, could be true of a paintbrush or a keyboard, but the knife is more than a creative or functional tool. Unless, for example, you are a very particular sort of person, the knife will be the only item in your possession designed to cut flesh. Think about it – eight inches of lethally sharp, ‘weapons-grade’ metal lying on your kitchen table, possessing the same potential for mayhem as a loaded handgun – and yet it is predominantly used to express your love for your family by making their tea.
The knife is one of the few objects to which we give house room while simultaneously fearing. My Old Nan, bless her, ‘didn’t quite trust’ gas and was genuinely relieved when, after the War, she finally ‘got The Electric’. I remember my mother quietly disposing of the pressure cooker and the deep-fat fryer as soon as she could. We are a risk-averse populace now and have purged our households of dangerous objects… except the knife. Nor is the knife an easy option: it’s the only remaining domestic tool that we must discipline ourselves to master – rather than taking it out of a box, switching it on and expecting it to serve us. Most of us learn from a parent how to use and respect a knife. We commit time and effort to our knives, caring for them, sharpening them, washing them carefully, reverently putting them away in a block, on a rack, in a box. Should we be surprised when what begins as a simple relationship between human and tool so easily elides into a kind of cultist fetishising? What is it about knives that makes us feel this way?
Like most things that we use every day, including our own bodies, a knife will change its shape and functionality over the course of its life. I once sat in a tapas bar in Barcelona and spotted the chef using a knife I’d never seen before. It had a handle like a standard 3-rivet Sabatier but the blade was a wickedly sharp little talon, about an inch long. My Spanish is appalling but I managed to get the owner to explain it. Once, he said, demonstrating with his nicked and burned hands, it had been a six-inch blade, but over 14 years he’d sharpened it down to this… and every working day he used it just to slit the skins from chorizo. There isn’t, as far as I’m aware, a ‘chorizo peeling knife’ in any kitchen supply shop, but there’s certainly one behind the bar at Cal Pep. It’s knackered, worn, beautiful and it’s the child of its owner, its working life and its environment. His knife is a perfect example of wabi-sabi, a Japanese word that conveys the aesthetic appeal of something worn and shaped by age and use, the very embodiment of evanescence and acquired ‘character’.
The knife is the day-to-day working tool of different craftspeople working with food. Chef ’s knives are similar to those we keep at home, while the knives of people who cut meat or fish all day are different. Like any craftsman’s tools, they are evolved to the work they do and imbued with the spirit of those who work with them. The delicate tourné knife in the hands of a commis chef carving fruit is a million miles from the lethally curved gutting knife in the hands of a trawlerman at sea and yet both have developed, through generations of skilled and specialised use, to share a beautiful simplicity of function.
Because knives are also weapons of war and tools of slaughter they are attended in many cultures by conventions that go so far beyond mere rules that they become taboo. In the West we are used to having knives by our plates but many cultures forbid the presence of something so dangerous at the communal table. It’s logical that, in a place where food is shared and hospitality is expressed, there should be no place for a weapon. These conventions go so far back in many cultures that they have affected the entire cuisine.
Our national knife styles can be as unique and individual as national dress or even language. As knives are primarily used in the preparation of food they are as varied as our cuisines and as affected by local ingredients, economies, beliefs and taboos. There is something wonderful in the idea of the knife as a symbol of massive human diversity and, somewhere, I hope that book is being written.
Far more exciting to me than the infinite subtle differences, are the similarities. This book doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive. Instead it’s a very personal selection of knives from around the world, chosen for the way they represent different physical qualities and how these resonate through the knives of different cultures and cuisines. With so much variety in knives globally it is genuinely a revelation to realise that the human grip is universal, that the ways we have grown to feel we can control the danger of blades* transcend nation and culture. Most exciting is how the design ‘responses’ of craftsmen throughout history, of every level of skill and artistry, from the shokunin of Japan to a woman making work knives from scrap metal in a market in India, end up so aligned. There must always be a heavy knife; its throat must be deep enough to protect the knuckles in a ‘hammer’ grip. It takes advantage of weight, whether it’s cutting meat in a carnivorous culture or tough vegetables in a vegetarian cuisine. There must always be a knife for cutting towards the thumb; its blade must be narrow, it has no need of a point and the handle must allow the knife to roll. It doesn’t matter whether it’s made of German tool steel or from a hacksaw blade and recycled pallet wood.
It is intriguing how many cultures have taken a single ‘master’ knife and developed it to serve many purposes – the chef ’s knife and the cai dao spring first to mind – yet also how another tradition, like the Japanese, has seen such value in the idea that they’ve absorbed it into their own knifemaking with developments like the santoku. Watching how the cultures now cross-fertilise – how Western chefs revere Japanese blades, how every chef ’s knife roll, in every culture, now contains a santoku as well as a chef ’s knife, how the Japanese have responded by adopting and improving
double grinding, and how chef ’s knives are evolving wider and lighter blades – is equally fascinating.
It’s tantalising to imagine that all this evolution might one day result in a couple of designs of hybrid ‘Überknife’. Imagine a blade as sharp as a yanagiba with a deep blade echoing the cai dao, the chef ’s knife and the usuba, a handle combining the heft and grip of the Western style with the easy rolling action of the wa style, a bolster to protect the finger, the versatility of the santoku, as easy for machines to replicate as a German blade, as seemly and light as a Japanese one. Sure, it might break with a thousand traditions, but as a symbol of what cooks and knifemakers across the world and throughout human history have evolved together, it would be a wonderful thing to add to your roll.
A kitchen knife carries a cultural, historical and technological load out of all proportion to its simple structure. A knife has a beautiful purity of purpose, it’s almost the perfect expression of form that precisely follows function, and yet it is at once a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities. To pick up a knife, to feel its heft and weight, is to connect with all of this. There are cultures that would speak of the ‘spirit’ of the blade, but I’m a little too British for that; instead, this book is an essay of praise for the knife, an exploration of its material self but, more, a celebration of its intangibles.
* blade A. leaf OE.; spathe of grass xiv. B. broad flattened part of an implement OE.; thin cutting edge, sword xiv. OE. blæd, pl. bladu = OS. blad, OHG. blat (G. blatt), ON. blað leaf, etc. :- Gmc. *blaðam, perh. pp. formation (IE. *-tos) on the base *blð- BLOW. The present form derives from OE.obl. cases. (Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, OUP 1986.)
ANATOMY OF THE KNIFE
THE TWO MAIN STRUCTURES of the knife are the blade and handle but there’s a much more complicated nomenclature for its various parts.
The blade has a point, a spine* and, if it curves along the bottom, a belly. When describing the position on the blade we refer to the heel, near the handle, and the tip, towards the point.
The bevel describes the way the blade is ground more thinly from the spine to the cutting edge and the face or cheek is the flat ground† surface.
The metal of the blade continues into the handle for strength and stability, in a portion called the tang. In Japanese blades, traditionally used with light strokes, the tang is a forged spike that’s stuck into a solid wooden handle. In most Western-pattern knives and those used for a more percussive style of chopping, the tang forms a central layer right through the handle – a full tang. In these cases the handle is formed of two plates or scales sandwiched either side of the tang and held together with rivets. The end of the handle is called the butt and in some knives may be a knob-like metal extension of the tang.
In some blades, particularly German-made chef ’s knives, a swelling is forged into the metal where blade meets handle. This is the bolster, which serves to strengthen the blade, to make it more intuitive so that the proper professional applies a ‘pinch’ grip, and to protect the fingers. This is the modern equivalent of the wonderfully named ricasso. The ricasso is the short, unsharpened portion of the blade just before it reaches the handle in early duelling weapons, where the forefinger could be wrapped over the handguard and laid against the blade for better grip. Where the blade joins a wood handle there is usually a ferrule made of bone or horn to stop the wood splitting.
* As if it wasn’t weird enough that we imbue knives with character and spirit, most of the parts of the knife are named after parts of our bodies.
† A double-ground blade, common in the West, is sharpened equally on both sides, giving a symmetrical wedge shape. A single-ground blade is sharpened on one side only, giving a more acute angle.
ON GRIP
THE WAY YOUR HAND FITS A KNIFE is an infinitely variable combination of hand size, handle shape, intention in cutting and culinary tradition. Nevertheless, there are five basic grip styles.
1. HAMMER GRIP. This is the way most people hold a cleaver or chopper: a strong, firm grasp with all the fingers wrapped around the handle one way and the thumb in opposition. It’s the natural grip for a striking blow but means that all control of the angle of the blade is through the wrist. It feels strong but not finely controllable. If you use a hatchet or axe frequently you’ll remember how much practice it took to get consecutive blows to land in the same place. Try cutting something big and tough, like a cabbage, with a less than sharp knife, however, and you’ll automatically assume the hammer grip – there’s no other way through.
2. PINCH GRIP. A fencer is taught to hold the foil between the tips of the thumb and forefinger, just under the guard. This creates a pivot through many degrees of freedom and the whole blade can be moved against it with the remaining three fingers. The chef ’s pinch grip works on a similar principle. The thumb and forefinger grip the back of the blade where the spine joins the handle, just in front of the bolster, and the remaining fingers fall loosely along the rest of the handle. The blade, pivoting on its point, can be moved rapidly up and down to fine-chop but the tip can be controlled, like the fencer’s foil, with the rest of the hand. This grip feels delicate and massively controlled but, as it’s poor at transmitting brute force, it relies on a wicked cutting edge.
3. POINT GRIP. It’s a weird quirk of human physiology and psychology that we become amazingly accurate at calculating, at an unconscious and instinctive level, exactly where our forefinger is pointing. You don’t need to squint along your finger, like sighting a gun, in order to know that it’s pointing at something. It’s one of those mind/muscle things, like catching a ball, for which we’re somehow deep-programmed.* Placing the forefinger along the spine of the knife ‘locks’ the blade into that instinct – an extension of the arm. Control over direction is total, though ability to exert serious pressure, except in a direct, thrusting action, is much reduced. A blade held this way needs to be sharp enough to cut easily in long, sweeping strokes. This is how sashimi chefs use their yanagibas.†
4. DAGGER GRIP. Similar to the hammer grip but with the blade tip facing in the opposite direction, out of the bottom of your hand. This grip is only really used by commercial butchers, hunters or fishermen, where the carcass is hanging or laid out on a bench. Holding the knife like this means you can exert enormous strength and the natural swing of the blade is away from your other hand. If you’re cutting down sides of beef or tuna all day, that’s a reassuring safety feature.
5. TOWARD-THE-THUMB GRIP. This takes a narrow blade and a small handle because the knife must be fully held and controlled by the four fingers wrapped around it. The cutting edge faces the thumb, which is used to push material on to it. This is the grip used to sharpen a pencil or whittle a point on a piece of wood and is the only time it’s ever permissible to cut towards a part of your body. The main skill is to cut fast and accurately without hitting the fleshy part of the thumb, which is why the curved French tourné knife in particular has such a complex geometry.
* ‘Everyone has the ability to point at an object. When a soldier points, he instinctively points at the feature on the object on which his eyes are focused. An impulse from the brain causes the arm and hand to stop when the finger reaches the proper position. When the eyes are shifted to a new object or feature, the finger, hand, and arm also shift to this point. It is this inherent trait that can be used by a soldier to rapidly and accurately engage targets.’
US Army Field Manual 3–23.35: Combat Training With Pistols M9 AND M11 (June, 2003).
† Surgeons are trained to use the ‘point’ grip on the scalpel for long initial incisions then to shift to the ‘pinch’ grip for dissection. The two raised circles on either side of a standard scalpel handle show where the pinch is made.
KNIFE STROKES
IN ORDER TO CUT, the blade must be moved through the material. The motion of the blade while cutting falls into seven styles, six of which require the second hand to adopt ‘The Claw’ (see opposite).
1. CHOP. The whole blade moves up and down vertically, remaining parallel to the cutting surface.
2. ROCKING CHOP. The rounded tip of the blade remains in contact with the board while it pivots down. This most useful action can be used lightly, when mincing herbs for example, or as a way of maintaining safe control on a really tough cut – when cutting through a big chicken joint, for example, it’s usual to rock back to locate the joint then hold down the tip with one hand and transfer full weight above the handle to push safely down and through the cartilage.
3. PUSH SLICE. Slide the blade forward, parallel to the cutting board, allowing the weight of the knife – or very light hand pressure – to carry it down until blade touches board. This is the classic Western vegetable slicing motion.
4. PU LL SLICE. Engage the heel of the blade and pull back and down in a single stroke – the sashimi cut. It’s similar in every sense to the push slice although sashimi chefs reputedly don’t allow the blade edge to touch the cutting board at the end of the cut.
5. ‘LOCOMOTIVE’. For fast vegetable work the blade is pushed forwards and halfway through and then pulled back and down, touching the board and then coming up again – a kind of circular chopping/slicing action with the forearm working like a piston on a train.