Proper Knives

You don’t have to live in the country to come to appreciate proper knives.  I’m sure you are staring at this right now wondering where I’m going with this.  Nowhere.  I’m going to talk about knives.

When I was younger I thought you had to have this fancy knife set, a knife for every purpose.  Those are fine but soon you find that they don’t accomplish what you need them for.  They look good but they really don’t get the job done.  It doesn’t take long for them to become dull and virtually worthless.  That didn’t keep me from using them but I cussed them the entire time.

When my mother-in-law died one of my most precious possession became one of her knives.  It was old.  It wasn’t a butcher knife but not a paring knife either.  It was worn to where it fit comfortably in my hand.  And it was sharp.  Really sharp.  I loved that knife.  But so did my sweet husband.  In fact, if we were both cooking we would fight over that knife.  If it seemed like it was dulling he would sharpen it until it was razor sharp.

I can remember cutting corn off the cob with that knife.  I could cut up green peppers for hours, getting them ready to freeze.  Onions were a breeze.  But the best thing that knife was good for was peeling tomatoes.  You wouldn’t think that was hard but you had to have a sharp knife in order to get that skin off of a tomato without cutting into the tomato.

In fact, we used that knife so much that the handle began to work its way loose and it was no longer comfortable to work with.  I wanted to retire it to my non-used utensils because I was not going to throw it away.

But then my dear, sweet husband came home from the flea market with a new knife.  It looked just like my mother-in-law’s knife.  It was old and worn, and sharp.  Really sharp.  It soon became my favorite.  But then more knives started popping up.  It seemed that a guy at the flea market was buying old knives and sharpening them up and reselling them.  One day, while I was up at the flea market, I went by this guy’s booth.  He had tables upon tables of knives.  One was older than the other and they were all sharper than the other.  I was in heaven.  And they were all very reasonably priced.  I think I bought 3 or 4 that day.  From that point on everyone got knives for gifts.

This guy also would buy old cast iron cookware, clean it up, make sure it was seasoned well, and re-sell it.  We love cast iron in our house.  So we had to compare his inventory with ours and invest in some of his treasures.  But we are pretty stingy, we didn’t give those as gifts.  We kept all of those for ourselves.

But good things come to an end and he retired.  Fortunately another guy started showing up at the flea market and he would sharpen your knives on-site.  You look pretty weird walking around the fairgrounds with butcher knives, but that’s what we did.  

And if we can find a deal on a cast-iron skilled we’ll still buy it.  We just have to get it ready to use ourselves.  But we don’t mind.  There’s just something about using this old stuff that was made to be used and was made not to wear out.  And we have been known to share a piece here or there.