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The Table

Richard Spencer

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Knife cuts

Though high-carbon stainless-steel knives stay sharper than their ancestors, knives today still suffer from ‘Red Ken’ or ‘Toff Boris’ fatigue. This is a repeated use which eventually blunts the cut. In the kitchen, the answer to this problem lies in sharpening the blade after each use, and I remain something of a traditionalist in this regard. Honing steels seem to me preferable to electric sharpening machines, whose high speed and heat will degrade the metal after a few dozen passes.

Blunt blades also result from Notting Hill Syndrome. The granite counter-tops so fashionable in this Young Tory haunt are made of stone that is harder than the knife steel; contact between the two materials flattens the blade. I am well aware that Notting Hill Syndrome may be an affliction of the entire Conservative party, a granitic rock of conviction which dulls even the most agile hand of policy — but let’s not get lost in all that. Suffice it to say that, in the kitchen, you want knives to come into contact with softer, yielding wood.

On the positive side, the cook might take clues about advanced technique from politicians skilled at twisting the knife rather than simply slicing or jabbing. The model here is Senator Clinton’s declaration about Senator Obama, ‘He is a Christian, as far as I know.’ The comma is the brilliant twist of the knife. We want to work with similar deftness in, for instance, opening oysters. (This is a job which should never be undertaken, by the way, without wearing a wire-mesh glove on the hand holding the oyster, the kitchen version of the mailed fist, and the oysters are easiest to open if thoroughly chilled.) The Clinton Comma consists in turning the oyster knife slightly as you pry open the oyster shell, then twisting slightly again as the oyster meat is cut from the bottom half.

But the Clinton Comma poses a great culinary danger. Just as she has nearly destroyed the Democratic party by twisting the knife, so in the kitchen subtlety can also be counterproductive. Complicated knife work which produces gherkins cut into tassels or tomatoes into roses diminishes the province of taste; the food becomes instead a theatrical display. The empty show of politics should reaffirm for us the proper purpose of dining: nourishment. The knife affirms that purpose when used carefully, logically and simply.