 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
A Knife Sharpener of My OwnNovember 26, 2005 Last night while chopping onions and then green peppers for a big pot of That Noodle Thing (one of my hot-plate staples), I couldn't help noticing that it took about 20 pounds of pressure before my trusty kitchen knife made more than a dent in the vegetables. Hardly surprising, since the shop where the knife was last sharpened went out of business at least seven years ago. Tonight, en route home from drive-by horse-sit, I stopped at Shirley's Hardware (where you can get anything you want, only first you have to find it) for a knife sharpener of my own. This was a Big Deal. When I was growing up, my family customarily gathered around the oval dining table for Sunday dinner. My father sat at the head of the table, my mother at the foot, and each of us four kids sat in the same place week after week, year after year. Of course (this was '50s suburbia, which continued well into the '60s and probably isn't dead yet) my father carved the chicken or roast beef or lamb or turkey. On occasion the carving knife was found wanting, whereupon he would sharpen it, using an implement that might have been used to parry dagger thrusts in hand-to-hand combat: protruding from a wooden handle was a long slender cylinder of dull gray metal. Woosh woosh woosh went the knife blade against the cylinder, and presto! the roast yielded without protest to the sharpened blade. How did it work? I was mystified. It had to be a Daddy thing, probably a Male thing -- a skill no girl could ever hope to master. To be sure, my mother sharpened knives, but in the kitchen, with a buzzing electric gizmo. This method was to real knife sharpening as cake from a mix was to cake from scratch. (Cakes were rarely if ever made from scratch in our house. Neither was much of anything else.) My awestruck conviction that real knife sharpening was a sex-linked skill forbidden to the likes of me managed to survive immersion in feminism and the acquisition of more culinary expertise than either of my parents ever mustered. Of my three knives, two -- the serrated bread knife and the sturdy core-and-parer -- are eternally sharp. My chop-and-slicer, though -- it had grown dull, uselessly dull, "you're going to chop your finger off someday" dull. So I stopped by Shirley's on the way home and for $2.49 bought my very first knife sharpener. It looks like a fat Oreo cookie with a grinding stone where the filling should be. Swish swish swish went my knife. I held it up to the light: a sharp edge! If only I had something to chop.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||