Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  Professional haute cuisine was founded on specialism. The great chef Escoffier, who laid the foundation for all modern French restaurant cooking, organized the kitchen into separate stations for sauces, meats, pastries. Each of these units had its own persnickety knives. In a kitchen organized on Escoffier principles, one person might be given the job of “turning” potatoes into perfect little spheres. For this task, he would use a tournet knife, a small parer with a blade like a bird’s beak. This curved blade would be awkward for cutting on a board—the angle is all wrong. Yet that arc is just right for swiping the skin off a handheld round object, following its contours to leave an aesthetically pleasing little globe. A garnish of turned vegetables—so pretty, so whimsical, so unmistakably French—is the direct result of a certain knife, wielded in a certain way, guided by a certain philosophy about what food should be.

  Our food is shaped by knives. And our knives are fashioned by that mysterious combination of local resources, technological innovation, and cultural preferences that makes up a cuisine. The French way with knives is not the only way. In the case of China, an entire approach to eating and cooking was founded on a single knife, the tou, often referred to as the Chinese cleaver, perhaps the most fearsomely useful knife ever devised.

  Cutting devices divide up into those that have one function and one function only—the Gorgonzola cutter, the arrow-shaped crab knife, the pineapple-slicing device that spirals down into the yellow fruit, removing the woody core and leaving only perfect juicy rings—and those that can be pressed into service for countless jobs: the multitaskers. And not surprisingly, different cooking cultures have produced different multitasker knives.

  The Inuit ulu, for example, is a fan-shaped blade (similar to an Italian mezzaluna) traditionally used by Eskimo women for anything from trimming a child’s hair to shaving blocks of ice, as well as chopping fish. The Japanese santoku is another multitasker, currently regarded as one of the most desirable all-purpose knives for the home kitchen. It is far lighter than a European chef’s knife, with a rounded tip, and often has oval dimples, called divots, along the blade. Santoku means “three uses,” so named because a santoku is equally good at cutting meat, chopping vegetables, and slicing fish.

  Perhaps no knife is quite as multifunctional, nor quite as essential to an entire food culture, as the Chinese tou. This wondrous blade is often referred to as a “cleaver” because it has the same square-bladed hatchet shape as the cleaver that butchers use to hack through meat bones. The tou’s use, however, is that of an all-purpose kitchen knife (for once, “all-purpose” is no exaggeration). For E. N. Anderson, the anthropologist of China, the tou exemplifies the principle of “minimax”: maximum usage from minimum cost and effort. The idea is a frugal one: the best Chinese kitchen would extract the maximum cooking potential from the minimum number of utensils. The tou fits the bill. This big-bladed knife, writes Anderson, is useful for

  splitting firewood, gutting and scaling fish, slicing vegetables, mincing meat, crushing garlic (with the dull side of the blade), cutting one’s nails, sharpening pencils, whittling new chopsticks, killing pigs, shaving (it is kept sharp enough, or supposedly is), and settling scores old and new with one’s enemies

  What makes the tou still more versatile is the fact that—unlike the Inuit ulu-it gave rise to what is widely considered one of the world’s two greatest cuisines (the other being French). From ancient times, the great characteristic of Chinese cookery was the intermingling of flavors through fine chopping. The tou made this possible. During the Zhou dynasty (1045—256 BC), when iron was first introduced to China, the art of fine gastronomy was referred to as “k’o’peng,” namely, to “cut and cook.” It was said of the philosopher Confucius (who lived from 551—479 BC) that he would eat no meat that had not been properly cut. By around 200 BC, cookbooks were using many different words for cutting and mincing, suggesting a high level of knife skills (dao gong).

  A typical tou has a blade of around 18 to 28 cm (7 to 11 inches) long. So far, very similar to a European chef’s knife. What’s dramatically different is the width of the blade: around 10 cm, or 4 inches, nearly twice as wide as the widest point on a chef’s knife. And the tou is the same width all the way along: no tapering, curving, or pointing. It’s a sizable rectangle of steel, but also surprisingly thin and light when you pick it up, much lighter than a French cleaver. It commands you to use it in a different way from a chef’s knife. Most European cutting uses a “locomotive” motion, rocking the knife back and forth, following the gradient of the blade. Because of its continuous flatness, a tou invites chopping with an up-down motion. The sound of knife work in a Chinese kitchen is louder and more percussive than in a French one: chop-chop-chop as opposed to tap-tap-tap. But this loudness does not reflect any crudeness of technique. With this single knife, Chinese cooks produce a far wider range of cutting shapes than the dicing, julienning, and so on produced by the many knives of French cuisine. A tou can create silken threads (8 cm long and very thin), silver-needle silken threads (even thinner), horse ears (3 cm slices cut on a steep angle), cubes, strips, and slices, to name but a few.

  No single inventor set out to devise this exceptional knife, or if someone did, the name is lost. The tou—and the entire cuisine it made possible—was a product of circumstances. First, metal. Cast iron was discovered in China around 500 BC. It was cheaper to produce than bronze, which allowed for knives that were large hunks of metal with wooden handles. Above all, the tou was the product of a frugal peasant culture. A tou could reduce ingredients to small enough pieces that the flavors of all the ingredients in a dish melded together and the pieces would cook very quickly, probably over a portable brazier. It was a thrifty tool that could make the most of scarce fuel: cut everything small, cook it fast, waste nothing. As a piece of technology, it is much smarter than it first looks. In tandem with the wok, it works as a device for extracting the most flavor from the bare minimum of cooking energy. When highly chopped food is stir-fried, more of the surface area is exposed to the oil, becoming crispy-brown and delicious. As with all technology, there is a trade-off: the hard work and skill lavished on prepping the ingredients buys you lightning-fast cooking time. A whole, uncut chicken takes more than an hour to cook in the oven. Even a single chicken breast can take twenty minutes. But tou-chopped fragments of chicken can cook in five minutes or less; the time is in the chopping (though this, too, is speedy in the right hands; on YouTube you can watch chef Martin Yan breaking down a chicken in eighteen seconds). Chinese cuisine is extremely varied from region to region: the fiery heat of Sichuan; the black beans and seafood of the Cantonese. What unites Chinese cooks from distant areas is their knife skills and their attachment to this one knife.

  The tou was at the heart of the way classical Chinese cooking was structured, and still is. Every meal must be balanced between fan— which normally means rice but can also apply to other grains or noodles—and ts’ai, the vegetables and meat dishes. The tou is a more essential component in this meal than any single ingredient, because it is the tou that cuts up the ts’ai and renders it in multiple different forms. There is an entire spectrum of cutting methods, with words to match. Take a carrot. Will you slice it vertically (qie) or horizontally (pian)? Or will you chop it (kan)? If so, what shape will you choose? Slivers (si), small cubes (ding), or chunks (kuai)? Whichever you adopt, you must stick to it exactly; a cook is judged by the precision of his or her knife strokes. There is a famous story about Lu Hsu, who was a prisoner under Emperor Ming. He was given a bowl of meat stew in his cell and knew at once that his mother had visited, for only she knew how to cut the meat in such perfect squares.

  Tous look terrifying. Handled by the right person, however, these threatening blades are delicate instruments and can achieve the same precision in cutting that a French chef needs an array of specialist blades to achieve. In skilled hands, a tou can cut ginger as thin as parchment; it can dice vegetables so fine they resemble flying-fish roe. This one knife
can prepare an entire banquet, from cutting fragile slivers of scallop and 5 cm lengths of green bean to carving cucumbers to look like lotus flowers.

  The tou is more than a device for fine dining. In poorer times, expensive ingredients can easily be omitted, so long as the knife work and the flavoring remain constant. The tou created a remarkable unity across the classes in Chinese cuisine, in contrast to British cookery, where rich food and poor food tend to operate in opposing spheres (the rich had roast beef, eaten from a tablecloth; the poor had bread and cheese, eaten from hand to mouth). Poor cooks in China might have far less ts’ai—far less vegetables and meat—to work with than their rich counterparts; but whatever they have, they will treat just the same. It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not. The Chinese cook takes fish and fowl, vegetable and meat, in all their diverse shapes and renders them geometrically exact and bite-sized.

  The tou’s greatest power is to save those eating from any knife work. Table knives are viewed as unnecessary and also slightly disgusting in China. To cut food at the table is regarded as a form of butchery. Once the tou has done its work, all the eater has to do is pick up the perfectly uniform morsels using chopsticks. The tou and the chopsticks work in perfect symbiosis: one chops, the other serves. Again, this is a more frugal way of doing things than the classical French approach, where, despite all that laborious slicing with diverse knives in the kitchen, still further knives are needed to eat the meal.

  The tou and its uses represent a radically different and alien culture of knives from that of Europe (and thence, America). Where a Chinese master cook used one knife, his French equivalent used many, with widely differing functions: butcher’s knives and boning knives, fruit knives and fish knives. Nor was it just a question of implements. The tou stood for a whole way of life of cooking and eating, one completely removed from the courtly dining of Europe. There is a vast chasm between a dish of tiny dry-fried slivers of beef, celery, and ginger, done in the Sichuan style, seasoned with chili-bean paste and Shaoxing wine in a careful balance of flavors; and a French steak, bloodied and whole, supplied at the table with a sharp knife for cutting and mustard to add flavor, according to the whim of the diner. The two represent diverse worldviews. It is the gulf between a culture of chopping and one of carving.

  In Europe, the pinnacle of knife work was not that performed by the cook but by the courtly carver, whose job it was to divide up meat at the dinner table for the lords and ladies. Whereas the tou was used on raw food and rendered it all as similar as possible, the medieval carver dealt with cooked food and was expected to understand that every animal—roasted whole—needed to be carved in its own special way with its own special knife and served with its own special sauce.

  “Sir, pray teach me how to carve, handle a knife and cut up birds, fish and flesh,” pleads one medieval courtesy book. According to a book published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1508, the English “Terms of a Carver” went thus:

  Break that deer

  Slice that brawn

  Rear that goose

  Lift that swan

  . . . Dismember that heron

  The rules of carving belonged to a world of symbols and signs: each animal had its own logic and had to be divided up accordingly There was a connection between the knives of carving and the weapons of hunting: the point was to divide the spoils of the hunt in a strict hierarchy to emphasize the power of the man on whose land the animals had been killed. The carver’s knife had to follow the lines and sinews of any given beast, and to do so in the service of a lord; it could not strike freely like a tou. The carver had to know that the wings on a hen were minced, whereas the legs were left whole. Further, there was honor to be had in getting it right. Carving was seen as so important at court that it evolved into a special office, “the Carvership,” which was held by designated officials and even included members of the nobility

  Unlike modern carvers, whose task is the equitable distribution of food as they preside over a Sunday roast or a Thanksgiving turkey, the medieval European carver was not in charge of the whole table but served only a single lord. His task was not sharing food fairly but rather taking the best of what was on the table for his particular master. He would scoop up samples of all the sauces on little pieces of bread, popping them into the mouths of waiters, to check for poison. A big part of the job was preventing the lord from consuming any “fumosities”—in other words, gristle, skin, feathers, or anything else that might prove indigestible. Beyond that, the carver didn’t actually do all that much with his knife. The lord would have his own sharp knife, after all, with which to tackle the meat as he ate it.

  What is striking about the medieval carving knife is how few cuts it made. The language of carving was brutal: dismember, spoil, break, unjoint. In contrast to the Chinese chef with his single tou, the knives at the carver’s disposal were many: large, heavy knives for carving big roasts such as stags and oxen; tiny knives for game birds; broad spatula-like serving knives for lifting the meat onto the trencher; and thin, blunt-bladed credence knives for clearing all crumbs from the tablecloth. Yet very few knife strokes were actually performed on the roast meats. To “dismember a heron” is a chilling phrase, but what it actually involved was posing the poor dead bird in a supposedly elegant arrangement on the trencher rather than chopping it into tiny pieces: “Take a heron, and raise his legs and wings as a crane, and sauce him,” says Worde. Sometimes the carver needed to break up large bones, and sometimes he would shred a bit of the meat—a capon wing was minced and mixed with wine or ale, for example. But the job of carver was more about serving than cutting. The carving knife did not need to render all of the food into bite-sized pieces. This would have been to usurp the role of the lord’s own knife.

  The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t. So much of what we believe about utensils is determined by culture, but cultural values are not fixed and eternal. From the seventeenth century onward, there was a great upheaval in European attitudes toward knives. The first change was that knives started to be pre-laid on the table, joined by that newfangled implement, the fork. This divested knives of their former magic. Rather than being specially tailored to an individual owner, cases of identical knives were now bought and sold by the dozen and laid out impersonally for whomever happened to sit down. The second change was that table knives ceased being sharp. They were thus divested of their power, too. The raison d’être of knives is to cut. It takes a civilization in an advanced state of politesse—or passive aggression—to devise on purpose a knife that does a worse job of cutting. In more ways than one, we are still living with the consequences of this change today.

  In 1637, Cardinal Richelieu, chief adviser to King Louis XIII of France, is supposed to have witnessed a dinner guest using the sharp tip of a double-edged knife to pick his teeth. This act so appalled the cardinal—whether because of the danger or the vulgarity is not entirely clear—that he ordered all his own knives to be made blunt, starting a new fashion. Until that time, eating knives tended to be sharpened on both sides of the blade, like a dagger. No more. In 1669, cutlers were forbidden by the next king, Louis XIV, from forging pointed dinner knives in France. Richelieu’s mandate against double-edged knives went along with a transformation of table manners and table implements. Europe underwent what the great sociologist Norbert Elias called the “Civilising process.” Patterns of behavior at the dining table changed markedly. Old certainties were crumbling. The Catholic Church had lost its former unity, and the chivalric codes of behavior were long gone. People suddenly felt revolted by ways of eating that had once been acceptable: taking meat from a common dish using fingers, drinking soups straight from the bowl, and using a single sharp knife to cut everything. All these things—which were once entirely in keeping with courtly manners—now felt uncivilized. Europeans now shared the Chinese wariness of sharp knives
at the table. Unlike the Chinese, Westerners kept knives for eating but disabled them in various ways.

  In France, knives were often kept off the table, except for certain specific tasks such as peeling and cutting fruit, for which personal sharp knives were produced, as in the old days. English knives stayed on the table but became significantly blunter. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English table knives look like miniature kitchen knives. The shape of the blade may vary, from daggerlike to penknife straight to scimitar-bladed. Sometimes the blade is double-edged, sometimes single-edged. But the knives all have this in common: they are sharp (or at least they would have been when they were shiny and new).

  Eighteenth-century table knives look completely different from those of the previous century. Suddenly, they are ostentatiously blunt. The blade often curves gently toward the right, finishing in a thoroughly rounded tip. It is a shape we now associate with butter knives-and with good reason. The table knife had ceased to be a very effective cutting device. It was now an ineffectual utensil, only good for spreading butter, placing things on the fork, or subdividing food that was already relatively soft.

  The new toothless table knife also led to a change in the way knives were held. Previously, a knife might be grasped with the whole hand in a stabbing pose. Now, the index finger was poised delicately along the top of the—newly blunt—spine with the palm of the hand wrapped round the handle. This is still the polite way to hold a table knife. It is one of the reasons so many of us have bad knife skills. We use the same grip on sharp knives as table knives, which is disastrous. When holding a kitchen knife, you should never rest your index finger along the spine—there’s far more danger of cutting yourself than when you robustly grip the bottom of the blade with thumb on one side and forefinger on the other. A good training in table manners—which teach constant diffidence around sharpness—is bad training for the kitchen.