#51 - Knives
It will come as little surprise that knives play a significant role in my new Kate Stark thriller, Knife's Edge. Knives both intrigue and scare me.
On the scare side, they have to go into the dishwasher point down. The mere idea that I could stab myself, even a little, while emptying the dishwasher literally gives me the shivers up my spine (even when writing this). I can trace this back to things like a major slice across my palm with a bread knife while splitting a bagel (a memory that still recurs forty years on every time I cut one open).
However, the intrigue side goes back to my days of helping my parents cook back when I still counted my age in single digits. I love that even all these years on, I'm still learning more and more about knives. So, here's a bit of a timeline and then a bit of what I learned while writing Knife's Edge.
As a Kid
Mom was not brilliant in the kitchen. For a woman who prepared three meals a day for most of twenty years before rebelling and occasionally attacked Julia Child recipes with great vigor and varied success, she never particularly grew as a cook. She rarely voyaged astray from the twenty or so dinners that were the core of her repertoire. (Her main gift was a mad passion for the written word, something she handed down to me with a vengeance. I'm never happier than when I'm lost in a book, the reading or the writing.)
Dad was a far better and more adventurous cook, when he could be bothered. In my teens, Mom tricked him with an omelet pan as a Christmas present. He spent many dinners becoming adept at making those and would do so any night Mom didn't want to cook. (We ate a lot of eggs in my high school years.)
She had a particularly challenging relationship with knives. I learned early on that every time Dad sharpened the kitchen knives that it was my job to get out the box of Band-Aids in preparation for the cuts to come. After Dad finally bought high-quality paring and chef's knives, which the latter of almost sent Mom to ER, we had a divided kitchen.
The commercial kitchen knives became Mom's and were never sharpened again. If she missed, they were too dull to do much damage. The 8-inch and 12-inch carbon steel knives became Dad's and eventually my own blades of choice. Even before I could properly hold the big knife, it was my job to maintain them. I learned to scour each with Comet and the end of an old wine cork at the least sign of water spotting. I knew the grades of sharpening stones to use based on the edge's wear or nicks, the best oils for the stone, and the proper angle for handling a kitchen steel to put the fine finish on the edge.
In my teens, it became my task to cut anything Mom's dull knife was no longer up to. For me, I rapidly learned that the dull knife as actually more dangerous because it slipped aside rather than biting in.
I also learned that while carbon steel did hold an edge better than stainless (especially back in those days), that they were a lot of work. When I moved out on my own, one of my first big purchases was a full set of Henckel stainless steel knives. It's the set I still use all of these decades later, which is why I gave them to Kate Stark as her favorite knives.
First Job
Fresh out of a liberal arts college with a BA in Geophysics, I was sick of the field and organized education. Also, it was the bottom of the oil crisis, which meant there were absolutely no good jobs for baby geologists. I suppose I could have gone to the Saudi oil fields, but that would have been a different life. Instead, I decided I wanted to go to work as a chef. With no actual marketable skills beyond running a swimming pool and snack bar for three summers, I landed a job in a fast-food fish house as an assistant manager. (I got the job because my diploma said that I had a proven ability to learn. The fact that it was from a top school and in Geophysics were both considered irrelevant.)
One of the things we did was cut our own fish. Skinned and cleaned, massive fillets arrived daily by the crateload. Each day, three- to five-hundred pounds of fish had to be cut down to four-ounce pieces fit for battering and deep frying. Enter the filleting knife. The long-thin blade, its curve tapering to a fine point was ideal for the job. Here, incredible sharpness was critical to create the ideal thin fillets.
I had to learn a whole new set of sharpening techniques, which I then passed on to the crews of several different restaurants in the chain. The knives provided by the company were...unexceptional; they didn't hold an edge for long. Knives are very personal in a commercial kitchen at any level and are rarely loaned to another person. At each store I worked, anyone involved in the fish cutting was soon wearing their own sheathed knife on their belt. We probably weren't the sort of places you wanted to try robbing.
Kate Stark
I moved out of restaurant work soon after and my personal knives didn't change particularly...until I began writing Kate Stark. Oh, there was the odd fighting knife wielded by some heroine or hero in my books: KA-BAR Marine Corps blades, edgy ceramic knives, and even the x-ray transparent (supposedly) composite Kerambit below. But I never acquired any of these weapons.
But then two very interesting blades became relevant. First, Rikka But then two very interesting blades became relevant. First, Rikka became an itamae, a sushi chef—literally one qualified to stand at the cutting board.
She says: “I use a Takayuki, the three-hundred-millimeter Genbu for my sushi and sashimi. I always found the big tuna knives a bit intimidating.”
300mm genbu and 600mm maguro
This knife is a shade under a foot long, allowing for smooth cuts as it's drawn over a long piece of fish. It also, rather unusually, is single-edged. Look at any typically knife from your Swiss Army blade up to a chef’s knife. Go beyond that to a machete or a sword. They are double-edged, tapering outward to both sides from the edge. The genbu is flat on one side, typically the left (for right-handed people).
Two things happen because of this. First, the blade is half the width of a typical knife. It will damage the fish less as it slides through. Second, it can also be sharpened to an even more razor-like edge. Does it dull faster? Oddly, no. Why? Because these knives are hand-forged with the same methods used to create the Japanese swords, making them incredibly strong. I’m sure that there is a third factor to that vertical side, having to do with the knife not drifting aside during the cut that is far beyond my skills or knowledge.
Then for Knife’ Edge I discovered the maguro.
“Is that a Shiratsuru maguro?” the camerawoman hadn’t aimed the lens at her face, instead focusing on her hands. Actually, on the half meter-long tuna knife—maguro named both the fish and the knife she still held.
This is the genbu’s big sister. If you’ve seen the videos of someone splitting open a whole tuna in a Japanese fish market with a long sword, that’s actually a maguro blade.
Watch the Tuna King (esp. 3:30-4:15)
These are also single-edged blades that have a flat side on the left for right-handed chefs and flat on the right for left-handed ones. As I mentioned above, chefs are very reluctant to let anyone else use their knives. So, the handedness only matters at the time of purchase.
Now, what makes a Tamahagane maguro worth $6,000 rather than the $1,500 one my character started with, I’d love to hear if you know. I know that it starts with the masa satetsu (high-grade iron sands of Shimane, Japan) and then…