In 1936, American food writer
George Rector began championing
the wooden bowl in his popular
columns inThe Saturday Evening Post.
He claimed to have picked up the idea
from a French chef called Hippolyte
Arnion and describes an alfresco
meal where he believed the bowl
“flavoured” his green salad. From
that point onwards Rector seemed
almost obsessed with his discovery,
making it his trademark gimmick,
and he repeatedly reinforced the idea
that “after you’ve been rubbing your
bowl with garlic and anointing it
with oil for some years, it will have
acquired the patinaof a Corinthian
bronze and the personality of a
100-year-old brandy”. Soon the never-
washed wooden salad bowl began to
crop up in kitchens across America.
Elizabeth David, when asked
to pass judgement on the idea of
rubbing raw garlic into the bowl,
is said to have responded waspishly
that it depended whether you were
intending to eat the bowl or the salad.
The chef’s knife is a surprisingly late
addition to the home kitchen. Though
professionals have, for as long as anyone
can remember, wielded a large knife for
tasks large or small, most home cooks
have justifiably found such a tool to be
beyond their needs and quite possibly
dangerous. In the domestic setting,
cutting was often done sitting down
and slicing veg towards the thumbs,
with whatever small knife was closest
to hand. In a way this is the most
natural approach and quite sufficient
for home cooks. It was only the
insistence of writers like Elizabeth
David and Robert Carrier in the
1950s that drove people to invest
in the then state-of-the-art Sabatier
kitchen knife – leading to a whole
series of changes in behaviour ranging
from regular sharpening to chopping
while standing up.The Sabatier was a truly totemic
piece of kit for the growing band of
keen home cooks. It was made of carbon
steel, which meantit went black when
used on onions or lemons. It had to be
sharpened regularly, you needed to take
time to learn how to use it and you’d cut
yourself many times in the process. It’s
impossible to imagine any other piece
of kitchen equipment surviving such a
learning curve without being dumped
for something simpler and safer, and yet
such was the symbolic significance of
the knife that home cooks persisted.
Today, buying one’s first expensive
kitchen knife is pretty much the defining
action by which food lovers declare
themselves – by bringing a pro tool into
a home setting. Investing in a decent
knife is felt to be the moment at which
one ceases merely to cook for one’s
family and begins to be “a cook”.“What’s most strange about peelers is how
weirdly regionally specific they are. One
would imagine the action of vegetable
peeling would be similar the world over.”KITCHEN KNIFE