by Tim Hayward
WEIGHT: 48G
MANUFACTURED BY: OPINEL
MATERIALS: SANDVIK 12C27 STAINLESS STEEL, OAK, BOAR BRISTLE
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: FRANCE
USES: HARVESTING AND CLEANING MUSHROOMS
(PUUKKO)
BLADE LENGTH: 56MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 200MM
WEIGHT: 52G
MANUFACTURED BY: N/A (HANDMADE AND UNBRANDED)
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL, ARCTIC CURLY BIRCH, ANTLER, BRASS, BRISTLE
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: FINLAND
USES: AS ABOVE
IN THE UK we tend to fear any mushroom that doesn’t come hygienically packaged in plastic, however, particularly across Northern Europe, mushroom foraging is a common pastime.
Amid all the choppers, hackers and cleavers, the mushroom knife is a delicate little thing… and so it should be because the mushroom you’re harvesting is in fact only the fruiting body of a much larger organism, the mycellium, which remains underground. If the mushroom can be removed with the least possible damage to the underlying mycellium it will go on fruiting regularly for a good long time, improving your harvest, or so the theory goes.
A mushroom knife has a short, sharp blade which is used to cut through the mushroom stem well below the soil surface and a delicate little brush that can remove any adhered dirt without disturbing the spores or damaging the gills. These two examples are (left) the Opinel version, common across France, and (right) a beautiful little model based on the traditional Finnish puukko belt knife.
TRUFFLE SLICER
BLADE LENGTH: 58MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 173MM
WEIGHT: 98G
MANUFACTURED BY: PADERNO
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: CANADA
USES: SHAVING TRUFFLES, CHOCOLATE, PARMESAN, GARLIC, BOTTARGA
TRUFFLES HAVE A UNIQUE TEXTURE that’s tougher and woodier than a regular mushroom but softer than a root vegetable. Because their flavour is so strong they need to be served in vanishingly thin flakes or slices and, because the flavour is so evanescent, the slicing must be done at table, barely seconds before eating. The truffle slicer or shaver is elegant enough to place before diners, it is adjustable for thickness, depending on your generosity or greed, and is razor-sharp.
It is sometimes said that a scalloped blade, seen here, is best for black truffles while a straight blade is better for the white variety. I’ve used this one successfully for both. The straight blades are, though, better for chocolate, Parmesan and garlic – the other things that can be neatly shaved with one of these. Be warned though, this is basically a mandoline – albeit a small one – without any guards. It will, almost certainly, remove exquisitely painful slices of fingertip with equal ease.
BREAD KNIFE
BLADE LENGTH: 210MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 310MM
WEIGHT: 130G
MANUFACTURED BY: PRESTIGE (SKYLINE)
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL, WOOD, CHROME-PLATED STEEL FERULE
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: UK
USE: SLICING BREAD
WE BRITISH CANNOT REALLY CLAIM the serrated bread knife entirely as our own but it’s not part of the classic French kit and there’s no requirement for it in Japanese cuisine, in which wheat is an unusual ingredient and there is no tradition of yeasted breads. The UK was the first nation to industrialise baking and the first to grow to love the large, brick-shaped loaves that benefit from a specialised cutting implement. Fresh bread is difficult to cut neatly, but once it’s a day or so old it can usually be sliced with a regular long-bladed knife as long as you’re careful and the crust isn’t insanely hard. The serrated blade*, though, means that pretty much anybody can saw a lump off any loaf and those fat, soft, white doorstops have become something of a cultural icon of British cuisine.
Though it’s rarely a thing of beauty, the bread knife will be present in British kitchens even when there are no other half-decent knives to speak of – places where the film on the microwave ready-meal is pierced by deranged stabbing with a table knife or possibly scorched with a fag-end. Its existence is a rebuttal of the beauty of good, well-kept knives and yet its functionality and ubiquity give it a sort of ugly charm. Most chefs will tell you that the worst kitchen injuries come from bread knives. In normal use, a plain sharp knife will cut with little force or motion where a bread knife requires a kind of vigorous sawing which can cause far worse damage.† Particularly lethal is cutting towards the hand to split a bread roll, causing the ‘Beigel Laceration’ that’s the fifth most common injury in US kitchens.
* Bread knives with a simple scallop-shaped serration can be sharpened but those with more complex ‘saw’ edges can’t.
† There are a few related knives with truly astonishing edge configurations that are sometimes sold as ‘freezer’ knives – the idea being that something with an edge like a timber saw can be used to cut through solid blocks of frozen material. These are, frankly, horrible objects.
ELECTRIC CARVING KNIFE
BLADE LENGTH: 210MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 498MM
WEIGHT: 767G
MANUFACTURED BY: SEARS ROEBUCK & CO.
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL, PLASTIC
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA
USES: CARVING COOKED MEAT, POULTRY, BAKED GOODS
PATENTS FOR ELECTRIC KNIVES started appearing between the wars amid a blizzard of other ‘labour-saving’ kitchen gadgetry. They are often billed as ‘carving’ knives – a term that imbues them with a certain elegant cachet but, in fact, they combine the technology of the serrated bread knife with the electrical hedge trimmer. Two thin blades, loosely clipped together, slide back and forth in a rapid, reciprocating action that will happily chew through most things without requiring too much physical effort.
Electric carving knives are one of the items that, along with the fondue set and the fish knives, were considered suitable wedding presents in the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s. As a result many lurk in the back of sideboards, often in their original packaging – a ghostly reminder of a time when social aspiration through consumption once briefly outran utility in design. It’s an odd thought, but of all the knives in this book, all the beautiful and costly blades, it is probably this one that holds the most widespread cultural significance. The trust in technology always to improve, the built-in obsolescence, the bounty of the post-war consumer economy, the lure of social aspiration and the power of mass-media advertising… the bizarrely useless* electric carving knife is a fetish to them all.
This American example from Sears Roebuck comes with a wall mount – a popular feature in the new ‘fitted’ kitchens along with the electric can opener and the kitchen phone. The remarkable colour scheme combines ‘avocado’ and ‘ersatz-teak’ to stunning ‘contemporary’ effect.
* Electric carving knives finally found a purpose when prop-, set- and boat-builders discovered that they were superb for cutting the new wonder product, expanded polystyrene foam.
ON CARVING
AT THE MEDIEVAL TABLE, large chunks of meat were an extremely high-status food. Cutting them up and distributing the pieces to guests in the correct order of hierarchy was a skilled act. Everyone in the dining hall would have carried their own eating knife at their belt but standing next to the guest of honour, wielding a socking great carving knife was what we would probably refer to today as a ‘security risk’. For this reason, the role of the Carver was assigned to a highly trusted and favoured gentleman who would have learned carving as one of the gentlemanly arts.
In 1508 London printer Wynkyn de Worde published th
e Boke of Keruynge or ‘Book of Carving’, an early self-help book for young men hoping to be accepted at court or into great houses. It covers most of the skills required for organising banquets but also provides a long and much-quoted list of specialist terms for all the ways that different creatures should be carved.*
It’s an entertaining list to quote but, sadly, it doesn’t actually give us much detail.† Contemporary engravings indicate that the meat may have been brought to the table on the spit on which it was cooked and carved ‘vertically’. There is something quite reassuring in the idea that for all his grandeur, Henry VIII was having his meat served to him in exactly the same way you or I might get a doner kebab.
Carving has enormous social significance in many cultures. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence describes feasting with Howeitat tribesmen in the desert tents and how each man would honour his guests by cutting meat for him from a great brass dish piled high with rice and roast mutton:
* dysmembre that heron
displaye that crane
disfygure that pecocke
baioynt that bytture
batache that cuclewe
alaye that felande
wynge that partryche
wynge that quayle
niynce that plouer
thye that pygyon
border that pauy
thye that woodcocke
thye all maner small byrdes
† He does, however, usefully remind the young gentleman that he will gain favour with his master by warming his underwear in front of the fire while helping him dress.
‘As the meat pile wore down (nobody really cared about rice: flesh was the luxury) one of the chief Howeitat eating with us would draw his dagger, silver hilted, set with turquoise, a signed masterpiece of Mohammed ibn Zari, of Jauf, and would cut criss-cross from the larger bones long diamonds of meat easily torn up between the fingers; for it was necessarily boiled very tender, since all had to be disposed of with the right hand which alone was honourable.’*
Perhaps the most spectacular carving ritual that’s still widely practised today is at a Burns Supper where the great sweating, groaning mass of the haggis is violently stabbed, traditionally with a sgian dhub dagger.
Charles Dickens has had a great influence on our national self-image where food is concerned. He used the family meal, the convivial board, as a symbol of plenty, prosperity and general rightness with the world. The paterfamilias, clashing knife and steel at the head of a packed table, preparing literally to portion out sustenance and distribute the bounty for which he’d striven, was symbolic of so much of his vision of a healthy, happy society. This image is still part of our cultural DNA to this day and we feel guilty when we grab hurried, packaged meals, rarely, if ever, sitting down together as a family.
There is a particular type of carving set, most commonly found today in junk shops. It comes in a beaten old leather-covered box and comprises a two-tined carving fork, with a sprung, snap-up guard, a steel, so Dad can ritually sharpen the blade, and a ‘carving knife’. Usually this has been worn into an irregular spike by Dad’s attentions. The handles will be either white bone – intended to mimic ivory – or stag horn, a distant reminder of estates we’ll never own. I don’t know anyone who still actually uses one of these sets but, whether forgotten wedding presents or left to us by grandparents, they continue to lurk in drawers.
The worn and neglected carving knife is perhaps the sorriest symbol of cultural loss. Dickens’ Christmas feasts were works of fiction – wishful thinking, even propaganda – and were probably a lot rarer in reality than we care to imagine; yet we all regret that we no longer assemble for the eating ritual that, in other cultures, is still an important part of family life. Many have forgotten how to carve, some are frightened to try and yet it is a simple thing – to take the food from the oven and, instead of plating it up in the kitchen, bring it to the table and give someone a knife and the honour of having a go.
* Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Ch. xivi. Available online as part of Project Gutenburg and, without doubt, my all-time-favourite piece of food writing.
10 RULES OF CARVING
1
REST THE MEAT before carving. There are several guidelines for this: one-third of the cooking time; 10 minutes per 3 centimetres of thickness; 20 minutes per kilogram, but the best way is to use a probe thermometer. Once the core temperature of the meat has dropped to 50°C the muscle fibres will have relaxed fully, meaning that juices will stay inside the meat instead of pumping out all over the serving plate. Properly rested meat slices beautifully, even across the grain, without breaking up.
2
CHECK THAT YOUR KNIFE IS SHARP. Use the longest carving knife you have to make long-stroke cuts. Take it slowly. If the knife is sharp enough you might even consider placing your finger along the spine to better control the blade.
3
YEAH, SURE, we’d all like to be able to take off wafer thin, regular thickness slices like the bloke at the carvery, but he does it all day and probably has some boringly homogenous, slightly overcooked meat to work with. Don’t sweat it. There is absolutely no shame in carving the kind of slices you feel comfortable cutting and that you enjoy eating. In my case, that’s thick and juicy.
4
USE A CARVING FORK to hold the joint steady but always slice either parallel to the tines or away from them. There are few feelings as unpleasant as sawing through the joint and running your carefully sharpened blade into the fork. Pros also use the fork to apply tension to poultry legs and wings while carving. Put the end of the leg between the tines and twist the fork. This should pull the leg away from the body and make it obvious where to slip in the knife.
5
CARVING BIRDS is a lot easier if the wishbone has been removed before cooking. This gives a straight, uninterrupted slice through the breast.
6
WITH CHICKENS and turkeys, it’s also worth locating the hip joints from inside the cavity and nicking through the tendons with a sharp knife before cooking.
7
WHEN YOU’RE READY TO CARVE, take off both legs with simple vertical cuts through the hip joint. Remove the breasts whole, though try, if you can, to leave a healthy chunk of meat at the base of the wing. This makes the wing a good serving by itself. The breast can be cut into slices across the grain. Use the heel of the knife to go through the ‘knee’. Take it carefully and just let the knife find its own way through the joint. The drumstick is a single serving, the thigh meat can be cut away from the bone in long slices.
8
CARVE A LEG OF LAMB or venison by holding the bone, wrapped in cloth, in one hand, raising it up from the board and cutting in long strokes, parallel to the bone and away from your body. This looks immensely impressive and is as close as you’re going to get to being Wynkyn de Worde’s young nobleman.
9
CUT THE MEAT AWAY from beef ribs first, so you have a single boneless piece before you start to slice it across the grain. Separate the ribs later and offer them for gnawing purposes.
10
WITH BEEF, LAMB OR PORK, only slice as much as you want to serve so the meat stays hot and leftovers can be stored as a single piece. Poultry should be completely removed from the bone as soon as possible as chilling it on the carcass gives an unpleasant, fowly taste.
AXE
BLADE LENGTH: 65MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 320MM
WEIGHT: 677G
MANUFACTURED BY: WETTERLINGS MANUFAKTUR AB
MATERIALS: CARBON STEEL, HICKORY
; COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: SWEDEN
USES: SPLITTING WOOD FOR OUTDOOR COOKING, LIGHT BUTCHERY AND SLAUGHTER
SO MANY DIFFERENT COOKING KNIVES can be used in a similar way to the axe that it would perhaps be wrong not to consider the original as a culinary implement. American butchers sometimes refer to the cleaver as a ‘meat axe’ and I have seen several Scandinavian barbecue teams use the same axes they use to dress logs to cut up and serve the sheep they’ve been roasting.
The axe in the picture is a small Wetterlings Hunter’s Hatchet #115. It’s light and is designed to be worn at the belt. We are told by its makers: ‘A sharp Hatchet gives you the extra power needed at slaughter – as well as that knife. This is also a definite item to be keeping in the back of your vehicle when the unexpected happens. You can handle a tree on the road as well as injured animals needing to be taken care of.’
I’ve ground mine perhaps just a little sharper than for wood splitting and use it whenever I roast large pieces of meat over open fires for parties.
PICNIC KNIVES
YOU CAN, OF COURSE, SURVIVE ALFRESCO EATING by carefully packing whatever knives you’d usually have used in the kitchen, but quite a lot of ingenuity has been poured into designing knives specially for picnicking, and quite a few traditional countryman’s knives, from various traditions, have become popular fixtures in the hamper.
On the left-hand side in the photograph is a ‘Bâtard Folding Picnic Knife’ from Lamson and Goodnow in the US. It works well for bread cutting – though I personally favour tearing – and the serrated edge can also be turned to carving cooked meat.