GETTING SHARPER

Once a year I collect all the knives from the kitchen and spend a day getting all of them sharp. Whenever I do this procedure, I am reminded of my friend Pete ‘The Knife’ Caulfield’s motto: “Everything sharpened except wit.”

As a callow youth I spent time in the freezing works where I learnt the importance of having a sharp knife. If you cut yourself on the chain you went to get your wound dressed but you were not permitted back on the floor until you had sharpened your knives. The theory was that a blunt knife meant you exerted more effort and were more likely to do yourself an injury. It’s a very good rule. It also taught me how to sharpen a knife properly and how to use a steel. I still have one of the old steels from my time in the works. Unlike many I have seen this one does not have heavy striations down its length. It was common to grind the steels smooth. The steel is not for sharpening; it’s for refining the edge and removing the burr. It can dress an edge to some degree but it won’t sharpen your knife. There is a point where you simply have to resharpen the blade, thereafter you can maintain the edge for some time with a steel.

It is a pleasure to prepare food with really sharp knives; it feels effortless. It’s no different in the shed of course — using blunt chisels is a recipe for disaster but the joy of being able to pare wood like cutting cheese is incomparable. So I usually sharpen all my chisels at the same time.

I have a sharpening device in the kitchen but it is no real replacement for having the knife properly ground. I use a wet grinding stone and then finish on water stones of 1000 and 6000 grit.

There are degrees of sharpness: arm-hair sharp (impressive), slicing-newsprint-cleanly sharp (respectable), whittling-hair sharp (scary). Scary sharp is what I’m aiming for. But the real test of a good kitchen knife has to be how thin you can slice a tomato. Only don’t try it with a chisel.

I usually start sharpening with a knife that I’m not too fussed about because my technique always takes a bit of practice to get back in tune. The first one often tends to get rounded rather than sharpened, especially on the water stones where the angle you hold the blade is critical. With chisels it’s not so much an issue since they have a well-defined bevel.

Knives have to be one of the earliest tools and that might explain the curious attachment that people have for them. At a recent event at Gameco in Masterton I saw not just a fine array of the knife maker’s art but a selection of swords. Not perhaps as utilitarian as they once may have been but objects of beauty nonetheless and, by the attention they garnered, also objects of desire. With their cast and engraved hilts, engraved blades, and beautifully finished scabbards, they were certainly collectors’ pieces. I’m not quite so sure that the work that goes into making one can ever be fully realized — after all, we don’t live in Westeros.

The old samurai swordsmiths, facing the demise of their profession with the banning of the samurai, moved to making saws and chisels using many of the same techniques that they used to make some of the finest swords. So, me in my shed sharpening my Japanese chisels links me directly back to the ancient swordsmiths of Japan.

I wonder how thinly I could slice a tomato with a sword?