historical cooking

A Tale of Three Knives

three paring knives (two hand-ground with steel blades and one mass-produced with a stainless steel blade) on a wooden table — Top to bottom: the Ikea VÖRDA, Phl Frazer’s knife, and Tod’s bone-handled knife

As a human being, every day I use edgetools to prepare food. This week I want to talk about three of the ones I use most often, and how much and how little some things have changed over the past 600 years. These were all made by the same modern technique (cutting a shape out of a sheet of rolled homogeneous steel and then grinding away the excess)

Scale-Tanged, Bone-Handled Knife TCP8

Overall length: 21 cm
Grip: 9 cm
Blade: 12 cm
Blade thickness (maximum): 3 mm
Blade width (maximum): 21 mm
Cross section: hollow-ground wedge
Material: Carbon steel with a bone grip riveted with brass tube and brass bolsters where the blade meets the handle

Tod’s knife has a heavy spine, a delicate shape in the blade and the handle, and has a pleasing substance in the hand like a Laguiole without being heavy or bulky.