Knife Skills

by Diana Moskovitz

My knives are a motley collection pulled together over the years through the circumstances of life: eight steak knives from a friend who got too many at her wedding and passed them along to me; approximately two dozen various stainless steel dinner knives from my grandmother, given to me when she moved into an assisted-living facility; a pair of serrated bread knives, a holiday gift from my mother-in-law; plus one large knife that I bought for myself at a big-box store because, it seemed, how could I be an adult without one? None of them is from the same collection, nothing matches or even looks remotely like it rolled off the same manufacturing belt. Collectively, they tell the story of the phases of my life—little notches in the fabric of my adulthood, all jangled together in a kitchen drawer. 

But there is just one knife that I use every day: my tiny knife, aka the paring knife. I got a pair, also a gift from my mother-in-law, one holiday season. In the morning, it cuts the fruit for my oatmeal; in the afternoon, the vegetables for my snacks. In the evening, it pries two slices of frozen bread apart. It stabs open plastic bags of kale and cuts slits atop the film of a frozen dinner. It is not just my workhorse, but perhaps the closest thing to an extension of my hand in the kitchen. 

You do not need to be a culinary master to see that every knife has a purpose, and I have blown right past that. Steak knives are for steak! Bread knives are for bread! On any given day, I will use up to three different pens to write on at least three different types of paper and yet my knife game is basic almost beyond the power of words to tell, to which I can only say that I have small hands and find that the small handle and blade of the paring knife feel correct to me. Larger knives feel unreliable and imprecise.