Today's Knives Are Dull
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published Unknown
11/22/2017
I do not know what has happened to knives but over the years they have become more and more dull (as indeed I have myself) so that carving has degenerated into a desperate sawing, and the meat of an excellent roast becomes, as it were, a block of hot rubber to be cut into edible chunks. Indeed many carving knives these days are provided with a saw edge in acknowledgement that one no longer carves. One saws. And the difference points to another nicety of our civilization, an admirable art, which is lost.
Some knives are even electrified so as to saw with the least effort through a prime roast. In gentle protest against this I once sent a friend an electric carving fork. It did nothing, but had an inert cord attached, and you could plug it into a wall socket and get some comfort out of that. Surely what goes for the knife in the way of embellishment goes for the fork, for they are old working companions, and it seems wrong to give to the one what is denied the other.
Matters were not always so. An honored weekly ritual in my father's time was his carving of the Sunday roast, during which he demanded (and got) complete silence. No chatter from the children, no remarks from my mother about the Sunday sermon, though she was a keen critic of sermons and many a bishop, and cardinal, too could have benefited from listening to her.
The roast was placed upon a sideboard and my father "addressed" himself to it with a carving knife and fork. First however, facing his family, he touched up the edge of the carving knife with a sharpening steel. What skill he had in this! The knife flicked up and down the steel, first one side and then the other, producing a small but eminently satisfactory ringing. I have tried doing this myself time and again, but have never succeeded beyond making a dull knife duller. Being the youngest boy of the family, I was never taught this art, but I recall the glorious day when my father looked across at my eldest brother and said to him, "Tom, have the goodness to address yourself to the roast."
Tom had become a man, to be trusted with the responsibilities of a man— not least among them, the carving of a roast of beef.
I did learn that each joint of meat had to be carved in a different manner—the heavier meats such as beef, mutton, lamb, ham, and pork always across the grain. A leg of lamb for instance should be carved lying on the side and starting about three inches back from the knuckle. The carving knife should be at an angle; the part with the most meat should be away from the carver. When that side is carved a change takes place. The joint is turned over and now the remainder of the meat is sliced off with the knife parallel to the bone.
Turkeys should be (as all know) upon their backs and the legs first removed. The meat from these is then carved separately, the knife parallel with the bone. The wings are then removed and the breast carved in long thin slices. Roasted hare—oh never mind about roasted hare. You won't find one in the length and breadth of the country. I will remark only about ham that the thinner it is sliced the better the taste in sandwiches. A thick slice of ham is fine on a plate but quite revolting between two slices of bread. There was a man in 18th-century London, renowned through the city for his ability to cut a slice of ham so thin that a newspaper might be read through it. Such is the decadence of his descendants that there is not a memorial to be found anywhere.
I speak, of course, of the days when bread came in crusty loaves and had to be sliced. This task my father left to my mother, but when we children ate in the kitchen the cook cut the bread for us. She was an ample woman with a bosom of magnitude which she used as a bread board. She would take the loaf, hold it upright against her bosom and slice the bread in that manner, and I was constantly in dread that she would make one cut too many, but she never did.
So if I had two wishes for the world, one would be the return of sharp carving knives and the other the return of crusty loaves of bread. Small things, indeed, but it is out of small things we often get our greatest comfort and pleasure.
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