I came down to an empty kitchen one morning and saw my everyday knife sitting alone on the work surface. With the early morning light glancing off its blade, it looked, well, lethal. How weird it seemed, to have this thing sitting in my kitchen every day, this purpose-built tool for cutting things up, an object with the same sort of potential for mayhem as a loaded handgun – and yet I use it for making my daughter her tea.
I’ve got a nice hammer and a perfectly lovely bag of spanners, but I don’t have any kind of relationship with those tools. There’s no complex combination of fear and respect. We carefully purge our houses of anything that has the possibility of risk and yet the knife is different. I was taught how to use it and I’ll pass on to my daughter how to handle it. I’ll treat it with care, maintain it, I’ll use it to make other things, to express creativity and love and, yes, sometimes I’ll lose concentration and the damn thing will make me bleed.
I began researching knives and it quickly became clear that every knife has a story. A £6,000 Japanese yanagiba might tell a glorious saga of samurai blades, of complex hand-forging by arcane methods, of a culture that treats the slicing of fish as an art form, but even each of my own knives, lying in the back of a drawer, embodied a little narrative of their culture, place and time.
The first knife I remember was my nan’s bread knife. Made by Prestige, it had a chromed steel serrated blade with a tiny length of tang stuck into a wooden handle. It was jazzily painted in those colours that spoke of the postwar boom but, if you ever clambered up the class ladder far enough to put it in a dishwasher, the blade would rust, the handle split and the paint peel off.
The bread knife is a peculiarly British confection. We had the industrial revolution before anyone else and were the first to mass-produce bread. Artisanal loaves required skilled hand-shaping but baking in tins didn’t. The boxy shape of a British loaf told a story of de-skilling a craft; its whiteness and soft crust symbolised deep-seated class aspirations. And, unlike a crisp baguette, our loaf could no longer be torn. It had to have a special serrated knife to cut the doorstep slices which, to this day, define the national bacon sandwich.
I don’t know where Mum got a Sabatier from. I don’t remember having Elizabeth David books on the shelf as a child and there were neither Le Creusets nor Agas in my early years. It must have been some time in the 1970s that it arrived, along with sophisticated pâté spooned from big ceramic pots at Sainsbury’s and the oil and vinegar which, one day, mysteriously supplanted the salad cream. We had moved to a new town after Dad was promoted, and there were new influences on the family.
I remember it was incredibly easy to get a wicked edge on the Sabatier by dragging it along a steel, but it was blackened by cutting lemons and made onions go a weird grey colour. I think Mum actually hated it. She was certainly diligent in blunting it on the same steel every time I sharpened it, in case anyone got hurt.
Around 1998, when Gordon Ramsay first graced our screens, I was an obnoxious foot-soldier in an ad agency and was fully bought into the idea of “cooking as a lifestyle statement”. I had my copy of The Foodie Handbook and with what now looks like appalling predictability, applied to be a contestant on a mercifully short-lived cooking show called Anything You Can Cook.
The premise was that the upstart “foodie” received a bag of ingredients and a recipe which they would cook in competition with “celebrity chef Brian Turner” who, working with the same stuff, would produce something far better. My balsamic-glazed lamb loin with lentils miraculously impressed the judges and I returned from Pebble Mill in a star-struck haze and bearing a set of Global knives.
Global was the first Japanese company to export knives on any real scale and their iconic black-spotted stainless-steel handles became something of a yuppie totem. They looked as good in my flat as they did in the Conran Shop.
Today, I sliced my breakfast avocado with a knife hand-forged in the Japanese style by young artisan knife-makers in London. The knives in my roll don’t just reflect my own life but collectively tell the story of our changing national relationship with food.
Even though I’ve spent the last year immersed in the arcana of knives, I’m still not enough of a hippie to believe they have a “spirit”, but if you lay them on the table and let them speak, they’ll tell you an amazing story.
Knife: the Culture, Craft and Cult of the Cook’s Knife by Tim Hayward is published by Quadrille at £20. To order a copy for £16.40, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
