Introduction

Introduction In this book, you’ll learn about knives from the West and Japan and from the moments in time when those worlds crashed and then melted into each other. These are the knives you’ll find in most professional kitchens and, chances are, in your own kitchen, too. You’ll learn to look at a knife and see right to its material roots— from the ore to the furnace to the polishing wheel—and beyond them to the story behind its footprint and the way it feels when you cut with it. This book holds what I now know after ten years of jumping down rabbit holes and tracing everything we sell at Bernal Cutlery to its origin. Along the way, I learned how to work a Japanese whetstone (first badly, then well) and how a sharp edge and cutting angle affect the flavor of food. I found out how Commodore Perry’s gunboats opened the door for the arrival of beef to Japan, and how single-celled organisms that fell to the seafloor of Pangaea hundreds of millions of years ago can turn an onion to butter 7 Sharp_INT_bluesNEW.indd 6-7 1/26/18 3:06 PM 8 under the edge of a Japanese steel knife. In France, Germany, and Japan, in lead us to those crashing and melting moments in history that brought the forges and small workshops where our favorite knives are made, I saw Japanese and Western culture together outside and inside the kitchen. SHARP how finishing a blade by hand against a grinding wheel really makes it sing There are other ways to trace a knife. I’ve found that following the cutting on the cutting board. feel of a Western or Japanese knife will take you back to the person who You’ll find all of that in these pages, as well as a practical guide to putting made it and the traditions that maker has kept. Today’s Japanese knifesmiths knives to use with techniques and recipes. In chapter 1, I begin with the raw inherited a thousand-year-old blacksmithing tradition, and they bring a mil- materials because that’s where all knives were born, and then move through lennium of practice manipulating steel into the knives I buy from Sanjō the history of smelting in Japan and the West. In chapter 2, I go deep into the and Sakai. The broad majority of the knives we sell are made using skilled history of knives in Europe, from the first restaurant in the mid-eighteenth handwork—and that’s what makes the knives sing: shaped to just the right century through the rise and fall of Europe’s preeminence in knife making. convexity against the walrus skin on a polishing wheel, or forge welded with In chapter 3, the focus turns to Japan, to the ancient furnace, black iron just the right balance of hard and soft steels. There’s no substitute for skilled sands, and prehistoric mud that drove Japanese knife making for centuries, hands, and these knives are in our shop because Sakai, Sanjō, Solingen and to the craftspeople who keep that legacy intact today. (German), and Thiers (French) have protected their artisans and heritage The second half of the book is devoted to content that helps you use your so well. These towns are not the only places where old-style, preindustrial knives to their best advantage. I begin with a sharpening lesson, exactly the smithing techniques survive, but through them we can tell the story of what way I’ve learned to teach at Bernal Cutlery after ten years of ironing out makes the heart of Bernal Cutlery beat: artistry and traditional techniques. the kinks. You’ll find a practical guide to knife skills and recipes from chefs This knowledge survives because certain people are working to keep it alive, who frequent the cutlery, including Traci Des Jardins of Jardinière, Stuart and Bernal Cutlery is lucky to have enduring relationships with them. Brioza of State Bird Provisions, and Loretta Keller, formerly of Coco500, all converts to my favorite knives who love them as much as I do. All of this has been bundled into a single book because the way a knife After many years of selling these knives, I found myself performs has everything to do with how it came to be. The story of knives in Japan on a pilgrimage to those workshops, to meet on this planet is a story of human beings and of movement, conquests, and the makers in person so that I might better understand trade. When you take a sharp, hand-ground gyuto to a carrot, it’s like taking a hot knife to cold butter, and that has everything to do with the development the forging, grinding, and sharpening techniques that of the hard, fine steel along its edge that evolved to suit the fine-grained make a knife sing. I returned two years later to do some research for sharpening stones that have been mined from a band of rock outside of this book, and on a cold April morning, I met Kazuomi Yamamoto in a little Kyoto for centuries. And the design of the gyuto, the downward sloping spine meeting room above the factory floor at the Yoshikane forge. We drank green and wide footprint, came about to suit the food that arrived in Japanese tea, and Yamamoto-san was serious and direct, if amused, with me when kitchens when the United States forced that country’s borders open. I dogged him (politely) for his secrets and for answers about his family’s I find it difficult to talk about a knife without talking about the world style of knife making. After nearly a century in the business, he left me with around it. Following the steel brings you to Japan, but chasing the footprint only two gems: sessa takuma and shoshin wasuru bekarazu. that inspired it lands you right in the middle of eighteenth-century Paris, The Japanese characters that make up sessa takuma translate roughly to “cut, Introduction when the restaurant was born. Knives like the gyuto or the small petty knife, shine, rock, and grind,” which suggests a friendly competition in which we which take their form from the West but their feel from Japan, inevitably study others’ skills to improve our own and to pass that knowledge on. The 9 Sharp_INT_bluesNEW.indd 8-9 1/26/18 3:06 PM 10 characters themselves look a little like rocks tumbling together to smooth It was in the stale wooden confines of an almost-empty dresser that I their edges, refining one another in order to refine themselves. Without their found it: a small, gold-hued penknife. It winked at me. Bonanza! My hand SHARP fellow tumblers, none of them would roll smoothly. The idea is that knife closed around it, and just like that, I had my very first knife. It was little, makers ought to study each others’ skills to improve their own and share yeah, but it gave me the courage to step up to the bigger, equally neglected what they know. Shoshin wasuru bekarazu tells us to remember the spirit and blades that populated our house, and eventually it fell out of favor when I youth of the beginner’s mind and that learning never ends. By embodying got my hands on those. Soon after, I liberated the giant carbon-steel chef both philosophies, a craftsperson opens space for skills to develop and egos knife collecting sticky dust in the back of a kitchen drawer, right behind the to soften. And that’s the space where exceptional knives are made. orange-plastic Parmesan cheese grater. My personal growth as a sharpener has been driven by working with I took it and stepped out of the house and into the dusty, dry grass of our cooks and seeing knives come back into the shop in various conditions for overgrown yard, the sound of freight-train brakes echoing from the tracks maintenance. As a sharpener and teacher, I enjoy nothing more than watch- near the Los Angeles River. As I carved tunnels in the dense brush, cleaving ing someone create his or her first good edge. Those initial edges bring me branches and vines with the gray carbon-steel blade, I knew only two things: back to my own beginning, to my yearning to learn, to my shoshin wasaru One, I could get in a lot of trouble. Two, I was having the time of my life. bekarazu. There is still so much to know if I remember to keep experimenting The moment I heard my mother moving around in the house, I stashed and asking questions. the knife in a tunnel I’d carved into the center of a massive honeysuckle I offer this book in that spirit. The craftspeople you will meet in these bush. Over the next several weekends, my backyard visits became a ritual, pages have mastered skills that will take me a lifetime (and then some) to until one morning when I unexpectedly heard the sound of my mom’s voice understand fully. At no point should you get the impression that I have any- behind me in the yard. In a panic, I threw the chef knife into a shrub. Despite thing more than a rudimentary comprehension of what they know. I don’t my best efforts, I never found it again. speak Japanese, I am not a metallurgist, I don’t have a time machine, and I Over the next couple of years, new knives came into my life.

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