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Husbands and KnivesCan a book teach my husband to dice onions, slice bagels, and core strawberries?

By Sara Dickerman
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:31 AM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Just as no figure skater ever won a gold medal solely for executing perfect figure eights, no one will become a great chef simply on the elegance of his brunoise. Show too much focus on juliennes and chiffonades, and you can be dismissed as a technician without soul. But without sharp knife skills, food cooks unevenly, expensive meat and fish turn raggedy, and lots of time and ingredients are wasted.

Beyond the purely practical value in good knife skills, there is a certain pride of blade—more often than not, a masculine pride—that goes with elegant handling. The kitchen knife is the domestic stand-in for the sword, and men who might otherwise show little interest in cookery can be quick to volunteer when it comes to cutting up whatever beast is for dinner. In his 1808 Host's Manual, the great French gourmand Grimod de la Reynière shamed gentlemen who did not know how to cut up a roast: "The host who does not know how to carve, nor to serve is like someone who has a fine library and cannot read. The one is almost as shameful as the other." These days, cooking-school students compete in knife-skills contests where they are judged on both the alacrity and the precision of their work (this knife, with a built-in ruler, is made for such competitions), and TV chefs from Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook to last year's Top Chef winner, Hung Huynh, have shown no small degree of satisfaction in their own rapid-fire food prep.

Alas, such pride of knife cannot be attributed to the man in my household, my husband, Andrew. Though not otherwise lacking in manly skills (like technical support or IKEA assembly), he is happy to defer to me when it comes to cutting up flesh, vegetable, or fruit. This has something to do with the eight years I spent as a professional cook, slicing mountains of onions, chopping forests of parsley, and gutting and filleting more fish than I care to remember. I was never the best knife worker in the kitchen, but those years of practice have paid off when it comes to prepping at home.

I had two major breakthroughs in my own knife-skills training. First, I learned to seek stability in whatever object I was cutting, usually by slicing a thin piece off the bottom of the carrot or zucchini or lemon in question, in order to keep it from rolling. It's simple, but it made my gleaming chef's knife seem a lot less dangerous. Secondly, I learned to work systematically left to right—keeping a pile of uncut items on the one side of my knife, and the chopped items on the other—so that I didn't waste time shuffling the ingredients around the board. That kind of organization keeps you moving along at a fast clip.

Somehow, Andrew hasn't sought out such pearls of wisdom from me, but the release of Norman Weinstein's new book-plus-DVD, Mastering Knife Skills, got me wondering whether it would be possible to get Andrew dicing the occasional onion and cutting bagels in a way that doesn't threaten his brachial artery. Weinstein is a longtime chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, and Mastering Knife Skills is copiously illustrated with photo close-ups demonstrating grips and knife positions. In the accompanying video, Weinstein is pleasantly fluid and matter-of-fact. He mostly focuses on the basic cuts that are useful to home cooks: dicing vegetables, segmenting citrus fruit, breaking down chickens, filleting fish, and other essential maneuvers (although for some reason he spends a few pages explaining how to make hotel-style garnishes like lemon baskets and tomato roses). Could Weinstein provide a knife-skills makeover for Andrew? Lured by the promise of an appearance in Slate, my hammy spouse volunteered.

I videotaped Andrew before and after he had watched and read Weinstein on four basic knife operations: slicing a bagel, carving a roast chicken, coring strawberries, and dicing onions.

Weinstein managed to reform my husband when it came to bagel slicing—for years I've shivered as he cuts his bagel towards the palm of his hand.

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Sara Dickerman has written about food for the New York Times Magazine, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, and Seattle magazine.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Comment from the Fray

They teach chefs to stand by the garbage sometimes to see where their profits are going... but this only works when margins are chef-knife thin or portions are being done by the hundreds. In fact, keeping staff on for slow nights, preparing things that have to be ready but can't be kept, rent, and various other frictions take more out of a restaurant than simple prep waste.

This is one of the things that explains why the pro cook will slice a good chunk out of some vegetable to stabilize it on the board and speed the chopping. Food is cheap relative to prep time and accidents. Getting 10% more out of each cucumber won't solve a prep cook getting cut.

The home cook thinks differently. They don't square off vegetable to dice it and discard all the curved parts. The waste would be frightening. And so, shapes are uneven and cutting relatively slow...

--BenK

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