Knife-cleaning
January 13, 2017 9:53 PM   Subscribe

Cleaning the knives was one of the daily, heavy, unpleasant household tasks through the long 19th century.

Until a century ago, most knife blades were carbon steel or iron. Acid or sulfur in food corroded them. They rusted in storage. Knives therefore were not only washed but ideally polished every day they were used. Chunks of Bath brick (weakly fired sediment) were ground together over a flat, possibly greased, ideally leather-wrapped board, the knife blades were stropped against the gritty board until they were shiny, and finally the blades were lightly greased for storage.

This was a man's job in a house that could afford a male servant. (Cleaning the boots was also generally assigned to a man, though not cleaning the front stoop and the stove, which sound at least as exhausting.) During the Opium Wars, Robert Forbes was confined with the rest of the Western merchants in Canton, without servants; his letters are full of details of who has to do which domestic tasks -- the Portuguese clerks, who seem to be twice-over at the bottom of the pecking order, get to clean the knives. Forbes himself cleans the glass and silver.*

Respectable table knives had handles made of delicate material that couldn't be cleaned the same way as the blades, and also it was easy to soak the blades loose in their sockets, so just getting all parts clean and oiled enough to put away without being damaged took some fuss. But Victorian overcomplication was matched by Victorian ingenuity, in this case Kent's patent
knife-cleaning machines
, used at home or in street knife-cleaning carts. Despite competitors, this was profitable enough for more than fifty years to support a company "for the applications of Science to the Comforts of Life" that developed an electric-powered knife cleaner in 1906 and survived to develop a digital control system in 1965.

What solved this? Stainless steel. Studying chromium steel to make better gun-barrels, Harry Brearly found an acid-resistant steel in 1913. Despite the needed time for research and production, and diversion by the First World War, stainless knives were popular immediately. The Labour-Saving House in 1918, and the Guardian in 1921, list stainless knives as labour-saving devices, making it possible for a housewife to manage without any servant.

I don't know how earlier knives were kept -- medieval belt-knives, or indeed anything outside the Anglosphere. Was early life just so greasy the knives didn't corrode? Did non-toffs put up with a mild patina, as modern chefs mostly do? Were knives so precious that cleaning them constantly went without saying? What about knives at sea?

* Kerr, P. F., ed. Letters from China: The Canton-Boston Correspondence of Robert Bennet Forbes, 1838-1840. Mystic Seaport Museum, 1996, p. 115.
posted by clew (54 comments total) 111 users marked this as a favorite
 
Man, this is interesting. Were they unaware of the chemical reactions that cause modern chefs to avoid scrubbing away the patina, or was the fear of losing the knife greater than any culinary concern?

So much time back then had to have been dedicated solely to cleaning and maintaining day to day tools. Leather goods need attention to stay durable, and if that's one of the main elements of clothing and tools, that takes up a lot of time. Raw metal (which before stainless steel meant all metal) needs constant care, either the way knives do or by painting or greasing. Cooking in cast iron and copper means that everything needs special attention right away and can't be just left to soak overnight. Non-electric lighting means that wicks need trimming, lamps refueling and candles replaced and remade. Wooden floors needed attention because modern floor sealants didn't exist yet and what they had was expensive, and the wood was much more exposed and live. Even keeping food edible would have required more upkeep, checking on stores of food in cellars and and iceboxes that fluctuate more in temperature and are not as well sealed. Wool clothing needs special care to stay soft and durable, dry cleaning wasn't so much a thing yet.

Also, everything was in shorter supply and harder to make, and more things were expected to last years if not decades, so all of this was basically necessary for everyone. People who could afford servants also cared about the cost of knives.

For a while now I've been trying to have more things in my life that will last years with proper care, and that usually means things made in an older manner. One of the reasons "They don't make them like they used to" is because they way they used to make them required a ton of work to keep them lasting, and a lot of people are willing to sacrifice quality and lifespan of an item for not having to condition it after every use. Keeping up good cast iron, carbon steel knives and sturdy leather boots requires attention and also kind of sucks when you are tired. Trying to imagine living such that everything you own needs that attention and there are no alternatives is nuts.
posted by neonrev at 10:46 PM on January 13, 2017 [53 favorites]


It sounds like, at least in some contexts, people put a premium on shiny knives. I can see this being a thing in a household where one would employ a footman. That would imply a good deal of resources are used on keeping up appearances, and knives, silverware, and so on, should have a shiny, new appearance. Because carbon steel knives will not rust away if not polished daily. In fact, shiny carbon steel is more prone to rust than carbon steel that has been allowed the gray/black patina to develop.

Honestly, non-stainless knives aren't all that hard to care for. Don't let them stay wet, and they'll last decades. They don't need to be seasoned or anything like that. Use them, and they turn gray/black. The patina also seems to minimize the metallic taste carbon steel tends to impart on some foods.

So I conclude that proper Victorian era people just had a thing for shiny, presentation grade cutlery. Even if it wasn't necessarily practical or even optimum.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:01 PM on January 13, 2017 [15 favorites]


So much time now has to be dedicated solely to securing and maintaining day to day networked tools. Servers need attention to stay connected, and if that's one of the main elements of your network that takes up a lot of time. Routers need constant care, either the way computers do or by restarting or reconfiguring. Connecting wirelessly means that everything needs special attention right away and can't be just left to idle overnight, etc, etc.

Sorry neonrev, not making fun, the parallels just struck me.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 11:10 PM on January 13, 2017 [20 favorites]


Just wish I had a footman to keep everything running.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 11:11 PM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


A few more decades of increasing wealth inequality, and you very well may. Or you may end up being somebody's footman. Exciting times.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:30 PM on January 13, 2017 [20 favorites]


This is a fantastic post and tomorrow I will take some time and sharpen my knives (but not polish them because they don't need it, whew). Thank you!
posted by rtha at 11:35 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well sharpened knives, of which I have manifested many, are the solution to far more things than one could possibly be aware.
posted by juice boo at 11:43 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Not really buying the premise; silverware is/was a thing. Iron knives?

Craftspersons take pride in their tools and will/should/ought to take care of them properly. As part of being good at their trade.

How is cleaning knives (indoor work) more worse than shoveling shit or having to perform sex with someone who's loathsome?

Granted, 'stainless' (+chromium) steel alloys are awesome, but
posted by porpoise at 11:53 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Yeah I know technological solutions to social problems has a deservedly bad rep recently but so much depends on just removing the nonstop miserable dudrgery of the past.
posted by The Whelk at 12:38 AM on January 14, 2017 [11 favorites]


Not really buying the premise; silverware is/was a thing. Iron knives?

Knives made of things other than silver were/are a thing.
posted by thelonius at 1:19 AM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Not really buying the premise; silverware is/was a thing. Iron knives?

Silver was massively more expensive in the 19th century than it is today. Most people couldn't afford silverware.

The responses to this piece in this thread are really weird. I think it's something to do with people not understanding that, in real terms, most Victorians, even in the middle classes (including a significant proportion of those employing some level of domestic labour), lived massively less wealthy and more difficult lives than we do. We, also, do all kinds of things for the cosmetic upkeep of our homes and our goods, it's just that we have massive technological aid in doing so.

A lot of the responses feel a bit sneering, and I don't really get why.
posted by howfar at 2:10 AM on January 14, 2017 [36 favorites]


The Whelk: "Yeah I know technological solutions to social problems has a deservedly bad rep recently but so much depends on just removing the nonstop miserable dudrgery of the past."

And swapping it for the new hot nonstop miserable drudgery of THE FUTURE!
posted by Samizdata at 3:05 AM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


It sounds like you've got the wrong network equipment, Mei's lost sandal. I rarely have to check that anything in my network is actually working. Most of my maintenance consists of helping people connect to their Apple TVs (98% of which is turning X off and on again) and telling them to restart their MacBooks when mDNS crashes again.
posted by oheso at 3:06 AM on January 14, 2017


That sounds like it might include the sorts of things you may not want to admit to in a public forum, juice boo ...
posted by oheso at 3:08 AM on January 14, 2017


> "And swapping it for the new hot nonstop miserable drudgery of THE FUTURE!"

... a message written on the magic communications, information retrieval, and task-performance device built of materials only invented in the relatively recent past.
posted by kyrademon at 3:29 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


There is perchance a subtle irony that one is reading this post and comments while, in the distance and downstairs in the tower scullery, the sounds of one's butler cleaning the silverware emerge.
posted by Wordshore at 3:52 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Anyone here ever eat scrambled eggs with a cheap silver plated utensil? UGH! Egg and silverware react so that the silver has a most unpleasant taste, or it did when I was a child. This may of course have been because our silverware was so cheap and purchased with box tops from the soap flakes. I had to learn the technique of eating without ever touching the utensil with my tongue. Unfortunately a little bit of the flavour would transfer over to the eggs as well.

People who are used to stainless steel probably don't realise that not only did the flavour transfer from other metals but so did some of the elements such as lead from the metal alloys. Poor housekeeping could actually be lethal. You had to send some of your utensils to be re-tinned periodically or the metal below the surface would be exposed from use and could poison the family, or merely stain everything. The copper they boiled the laundry in might be made out of copper, but it was tinned copper or the family's linen would turn green.

Remember the rhyme, "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor..." or the verb "to tinker" with something? Tinkering was the occupation that tended metal and mended pots. When a small hole burned through the bottom of a pot you didn't throw it out, you got the tinker to mend it with a flat headed bolt and a pair of washers, or if the hole was too large for washers the tinker could make a tinker's dam out of newspaper by filling in the hole with a flat papier mache patch and then cover the outside of it with solder. He could also do this to your metal pipes, such as the lead ones used back in the day...

Tinkers and knife grinders were often the same person. They put your knife handles back on, or constructed new ones. They would sharpen saws, one tooth at a time, scissors, skate blades and kitchen knives. (You did your own axes - if you had one it was in constant use breaking wood for the fire and had to be sharpened all the time.) Many cheap pots and metal buckets had a rim that was rolled around a wire ring and then had a wire handle. They used metal to recreate a design that started with osier and leather. The metal ones got broken all the time and could be mended by a decent tinker.

The wire loops were called bales. This was also the word they used for the ribs that support the canvas paulin of a covered wagon. (Paulins treated with tar to be waterproof were called tarpaulins). You might use a bale handled bucket for baling a boat or use cheap wire that was flexible for baling straw. If you baled the straw you bound it up into a square or rectangular shape, but if you trussed it up you only wound the wire or cord around it in one direction, perpendicular to the the stalks. One truss of straw equaled 36 pounds, a truss of old hay equaled 56 pounds, a truss of new hay equaled 60 pounds, and 36 trusses equaled one load, something you learned in school at the same time as you learned how many pints to the quart and shillings to the pound. If you trussed a turkey you tied its wings down so they wouldn't stick out and get incinerated or ignite over an open fire; you also tied its cavity closed so the stuffing wouldn't fall out. If you had lifted too many bales of new hay, something that happened to countless laborers, your overworked belly muscles would split and you would develop a hernia. To prevent this, or to try and keep able to work after it happened, you would wear a truss, a belt you wore around your lower belly holding a pad against the rupture area, often patent and involving rubber which was stretchy and would provide a little bit of give.

The word truss is also related to trestle. The earliest use of the word the truss was a flexible bar made of wood or metal, usually used for temporary animal pens. However the word went in two directions; a truss is now so flexible it can be wrapped in a circle, a trestle is a containing framework made out of rigid beams and diagonal cross beams, as used in a trestle bridge. The diagonal braces of a trestle support a trestle table.

Another type of animal pen was made from hurdles, short sections of flexible fence. Rather than putting a fence around your fields and then having to upkeep yards and yards of them enclosing your entire yard you just let the animals loose. When you needed to pen them up you drove them all into a small area and enclosed them in the hurdles. Hurdles were normally made of wicker. They were much like those little plastic sections of fence that sometimes come with toy farm animals that can be attached to each other at both ends. If that wasn't secure enough you could always peg them into the ground as well. If you got bored while the animals were loose grazing you could line up all your hurdles and jump over them. You cleared the last hurdle by hurtling yourself over it.

Hurdles are used in track and field rather than fences because a fence is fixed permanently to the ground, whereas if you flub your jump and trip on the hurdle it will come down. You are much less likely to be injured if the hurdle goes down. The base of the hurdle is not fixed The base of something is what you build on, as when you have a basement, or when the primary location is your base. (All of your base is belong to us.) But the material used to create something before it gets covered over is also your base. It's the basic substance used. And if it is a base metal, like the one used for knives, it may cause a chemical reaction corroding or oxidizing when exposed to an acid because it has a high ph level and is basic...


... I think someone just hit my "regurgitate history" button. Or was that word association?
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:55 AM on January 14, 2017 [238 favorites]


We had some ivory-handled carbon steel knives at home. I think they were a wedding present for my parents. Either way, by the time I remember them, they had been worn down until the edge was nearly concave and they were just some odd knives in the cutlery drawer.

We washed the blades in soapy water, but didn't immerse the whole knife: to prevent the blades from soaking loose, as clew says. Didn't bother polishing them though, and they didn't need daily attention, or oiling/greasing, to prevent rust.
posted by YAMWAK at 4:59 AM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


The wire loops were called bales.

Bails. Emptying water from a boat is bailing. However, hay is gathered into bales and secured with baling wire.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:31 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Or is this a British spelling?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:33 AM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Before the Bath brick(TM) they used whatever type of sand or sandbrick they could reasonably get. Sandstone was imported immense distances in to get a nice grain of sand, and even apparently was a resource that led to small tribal wars in North America. Sandstone was used not just to polish metal but was useful or essential in working with wood, leather and anything else that might want abrading. They were finicky about what sand they used, since some sands contain corrosive particles, such as salt so at the very least the sand would be washed and sifted before it was used, and different locations were used to get sand for different uses. The sand could even be ground to make it finer.

Fine powder might be used as a lubricant as well as to polish things. Sand or grain or pease between two solid objects makes it easier to drag one of them and the crushed grain can be swept up afterwards having conveniently turned into flour. The pease flour could then be baked into horsebread if you didn't want to feed it to the family. If you were sealing a cellar with a stone you would use a lever and scatter particles so that you could roll the stone into place. (Think of the stone that sealed the tomb of Jesus -they used stones to seal a lot of storage areas that would not be opened for a long while, as it prevented petty pilfering, if not determined thieves or angels.)

A small keg filled with sand was used for removing rust from metal items such as chain mail, where much of the surface was impractical to access. By rolling the key the chain links would get polished nicely, just like using a rock tumbler.

Emery cloth was also used. This is a cloth to which a fine grit has been adhered. In the absence of emery (corundum grit) other sands could be used, but a less fine sand would wear the cloth out much earlier. You might know the word emery from "emery board"

Cheap rag could also be made into a bag filled with fine sand and fine implements such as bodkins or needles or awls thrust into it. This would tend to come apart quickly, so instead you could thrust your knife through the open bung of the sand cask. Some sand would spill but you just swept it up and put it back in the top of the cask.

(You may have seen red pincushions in the shape of an apple or tomato that have a strawberry attached by a green cord. The apple is stuff with fluff, and the strawberry with fine sand to sharpen the needles. )

One common way to treat metal tools was to use boiling water. After scouring with sand, boiling water was poured on the metal from out of a closed kettle. The water was as hot as possible so that it would evaporate instantly. The procedure involves a lot of sudden steam, and can result in scalds.

A closed kettle was a pressure cooker and and could easily explode, but pressure cooking was something that our ancestors like doing. When cooking a pot might be sealed with a rim of dough so that the fluids inside reached a higher temperature, or have coals or stones piled on it so the weight of the coals kept it sealed, or just reach higher temperatures because of the weight of the cast iron lid. The rim was the weak point and the intention was that if the pot burst it would be at the rim.

After the steam had blasted through and the metal was dry it would be greased. Rendered grease was always best, and rendered fish grease best of all.

If you couldn't get any grease, then some type of sand or powder might be used to protect the knife from moisture, the way talcum powder used to be used to soak up moisture on a baby's butt. Talc is another mineral that can be ground to powder the way carborundum can, but is down the opposite end of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. What powder they used would depend on availability. Particles of ground shell were also used. Ground shell frequently is very abrasive.

Both leather and glass were also used for sharpening, although their use tends to be in later periods. In the last century people would shave using a "safety razor" instead of an unguarded blade as you found on an open straight razor they would have a handle with blade guards and use a replaceable two-sided razor blade. The guards kept you from cutting more than about a milimetre deep. The razor blade was made of a very thin metal. When it got blunt you took it out and put it into a drinking glass and slid it around and around. The friction against the glass would sharpen the edge of one side, but if your finger slipped you would probably end up with a nasty deep cut.

The leather was used as a strop for the straight razor, the same way a stone is used. However glass and leather don't work well on many metals. Glass can only be used for a very fine edge indeed, given how smooth the glass feels to your fingers.

Knives were stored in a knife box or a knife case, too valuable to leave out or store in an open drawer or block.

Many people had only one knife and they used it, among other things, as a ruler. An inch was the distance from the tip of your thumb to the back of the joint when bent, but if you were not fully grown your inch would be increasing slowly, and even if you were an inch measurement would be slightly different for everyone in the household. So what you did was mark your knife by scratching it with whatever inch measurements you wanted to record - your mother's inch and your sister's inch and your own inch. That way if you needed to measure something precise you would have the measurement easy to find. Of course in time grinding your knife would wear it down and change the measure but you would have to renew the measurements eventually also, because you and your sister might be growing up, or your mother developing rheumatism that thickened her knuckle.

The knife as measuring stick was commonly used when making knife pleats. Each fold in the fabric would be the depth of the knife blade, and they would all be uniform. If you tried to make each pleat match the last one they would slowly get bigger or smaller, but if you used the knife they would stay uniform. (Pleating was important, because it provide the give to many garments worn by working people. A ploughman's smock, for example, would be pleated and smocked so he wouldn't wear it out too quickly or tear it under the arms when he thrust forward forcefully.)


A cutler was someone who made knives. There was a culter named Chipchase on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal when I was growing up and for some reason it always struck me as an appropriate name. He could also be a professional in charge of the knives, as in having both a cuttler and a buttler in your household. The butler was the servant who looked after the butts - the wine butts and wine bottles. He was the wine steward who made sure that there were drinkable beverages to serve but once upon a time he also looked after the water butts. (Which in turn when too scummy and mouldy to reuse got upended and used as archery targets... An archery target is still called an archery butt.

(The word butt comes from the Norse word for stump, and the English word for the unploughed end of a field which you couldn't plough because of the stumps there. Casks were made from stumps, or looked like stumps. A stump was what you sat on, and it was solid and inconvenient at times, useless like the unploughed end of a field. A butt would have a hole in it for withdrawing smaller quantities of the liquid. Our ancestors, having a coarse sense of humour started using the word butt to refer to a posterior, with many snickers about firing an arrow into your butt. The joke got so old that it just ended up being an ordinary word. (This might have come about because the early word aers (arse) not only meant the place you sit on but also your ear - and calling your arse your butt made it clear you were not talking about the openings on either side of your head. But I am now into nested brackets so I will stop here.))

Incidentally, a potter was someone who made metal pots and a crocker was someone who made pots out of crockery, or clay. But somehow quite recently the word crocker has dropped out of use, and the word potter has transferred over in meaning.

Also, a blacksmith worked with black metal - cast iron or wrought iron - while a whitesmith worked with other metals, such as lead and tin, pewter.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:48 AM on January 14, 2017 [133 favorites]


Nearly every new hand saw you can buy today has super-hardened teeth, which work beautifully for a while but the steel is impossible to sharpen when they do eventually wear out, so the saw gets thrown away. Another negative; the tooth geometry isn't very efficient for long cuts along the grain that allow you to get your piece of wood to the width you need. Paul Sellers has in depth videos on sharpening older saws, which gets easier after a couple saws...and few things are nicer than a sharp saw.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:54 AM on January 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


Oh, one more thought! Owning a knife was so important that it was traditionally something you gave to a child when they crossed from infantia to pueritas. This was a threshold age, usual seven-years-old where a child was considered old enough to leave home and capable of work, responsible enough to be trusted with a knife, and old enough to need their own. This was also the age when boys were breeched, eg. put into trousers from skirts and considered fully housebroken, and was the age at which a child was considered able to tell right from wrong. This knife might be the first thing they actually owned as their garments were still the property of their parents and would be passed on to younger siblings when outgrown and the household items they used, bed, dishes etc would be the property of their parents.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:12 AM on January 14, 2017 [56 favorites]


What percentage of households had servants?
posted by rebent at 6:23 AM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Holy moly. I love metafilter. So much good info
posted by wester at 6:30 AM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Japanese chefs still often use traditional carbon steel knives in a variety of patterns, depending on use. Unlike Western chefs, who are fine with a little patina, they take care to scour their blades and handles perfectly clean and shiny every day - these are Chef Morimoto's knives. The top is a brand new one, the bottom is one he's been using and scouring clean everyday for three years.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:48 AM on January 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


What percentage of households had servants?
posted by rebent at 6:23 AM on January 14

Most did. You hired your neighbours' kids and they hired yours. Most people had servants who were in their early teens because there were so many kids needing work and so much unskilled household work to be done, plus it was thought much easier for someone other than the parent to teach the kid and important for the kid to get experience beyond their own home. Most households were production centres that could use a twelve year old to stir long slow cooking pots, collect eggs or help get a glut of wool fibre spun. The kid might be working to earn something such as her own keep, a clutch of layers, or enough wool cloth to make a winter coat. She might be boarding away at another household so she could attend church there, if there was no church that had a Sunday School where she could learn to read in her own neighbourhood. (Sunday School used to teach literacy so you could read the Bible.) She might be working somewhere for six months so that she could learn how to use an iron range if her family didn't have one. She might be working to pay off a debt from one household to another.

As to the percentage... well, it would be totally variable because even if we are only talking about Europe and North America, we are talking about thousands of square miles, dozens of languages and hundreds of years (unless you mean only the 19th century). But the majority of people lived in agricultural households, and lived in a production centre and didn't limit their family size so there was a LOT of work and a lot of potential servants. There was seasonal work that required extra hands, and work done in the household that resulted in a produce that could be sold outside of it. So my answer is a generalization. Most.

There were disastrously poor people such as displaced agricultural workers now living in a rented room while they worked in factories, but they were the minority, just as the wealthy who lived in non-producing households because they had income were a minority. The poorer families that were so marginal that they didn't have servants were also so marginal that they didn't last long. Mr. Micawber's debt ridden family who fled from rental to rental to avoid the bailiffs had a servant who went with them. She was an "orfling" from St. Luke's Workhouse. The orphling would have been a survivor from one of these families. (Please note that the Micawbers and their orphling were fictional, but not not unrealistic.).

Basically anyone who could afford to feed a servant would want one and could have one.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:05 AM on January 14, 2017 [34 favorites]


The two knives in my kitchen that get the most use are from Japan. They both have a construction called 本割込 (hon-warikomi), where a carbon steel core is sandwiched between stainlesss layers. So the cutting edge is carbon steel, which holds a nice edge but needs to be maintained a little more carefully, but the rest is stainless, so it's lower maintenance. When I've taken these to a knife sharpener, he's commented on how nice they are. The funny thing is that I got both of them at grocery stores in Japan for about $35 each.
posted by adamrice at 7:16 AM on January 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


My wife always has two or three kids from the neighborhood, retired people, or college students on hire to do our yard work, shovel snow, clean windows and gutters, help out in the kitchen at parties, paint, plant and do other miscellaneous chores. It gives her a big network of helpers, makes her new friends, and does get a lot of work done around the house -- even if the work sometimes expands to accommodate the number of people around to do it. It used to mildly annoy me, since I'm an introvert, and not happy about having to be introduced to new people all the time. But reading Jane the Brown's comment above, I realize that these people are, in fact, servants. Non-servile servants. And this is probably how everybody of my class used to live.
posted by Modest House at 7:26 AM on January 14, 2017 [13 favorites]


I love it when Jane the Brown does a core dump. I feel so much smarter afterwards.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:30 AM on January 14, 2017 [39 favorites]


Nearly every new hand saw you can buy today has super-hardened teeth, which work beautifully for a while but the steel is impossible to sharpen when they do eventually wear out, so the saw gets thrown away.

Get some diamond files. Even if those saw teeth are carbide, diamond files will sharpen them. Small files suitable for saw teeth are pretty cheap.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:15 AM on January 14, 2017


Nearly every new hand saw you can buy today has super-hardened teeth

Lee Valley/Veritas, Lie-Nielsen, Bad Axe Toolworks, and several other companies continue to sell/make traditional hand saws that are intended to last for decades of re-sharpening. But it's true that you won't find those at a typical hardware store.
posted by jedicus at 8:42 AM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


OMG! Jane the Brown, I love it, and I don't want you to stop! Please, pace yourself, however. I am afeared you may do yourself an injury.

Wonderful post, claw! However, I take issue with the following:

(Cleaning the boots was also generally assigned to a man, though not cleaning the front stoop and the stove, which sound at least as exhausting.)

At least?!!?? That's minimizing 'women's work'!

Sharpening a knife could be done sitting down and finished in ten minutes, max, I figure. Not a horribly physical job! Cleaning the stoop was done on on your knees and involved extended hard scrubbing with a brush and, if I remember correctly, actually scrubbing with a stone to clean the grime. ( help me on this Jane the Brown)

Anyone that's ever blackened a stove knows that's a puke job. You have to get all the fiddily bits and polish HARD. It's dirty work, involving bending, reaching, and again kneeling, and you have to clean up afterward.

I would think that would be a minimum of an hour's extensive labor for both.

There's a reason it's called drudgery, done by drudges, usually female.

A man will work from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:19 AM on January 14, 2017 [9 favorites]


Get some diamond files.

The problem is that the very hard saws aren't carbide. They are not very high carbon steel and the hardness is accomplished by induction hardening. The teeth are shaped and sharpened and the edge is then exposed to a high frequency electrical field which very briefly heats a very thin surface layer to a very high temperature. The layer is so thin that the heat is very quickly conducted into the interior, leaving the outer layer very hard. When the saw eventually gets dull, you can in fact sharpen it with a diamond file, but when you do, the hardened layer is gone, leaving the unhardened core, which won't stay sharp.
posted by Bruce H. at 9:28 AM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Wool clothing needs special care to stay soft and durable

Actually, wool clothing was far easier to care for than the fabrics that replaced it. Wool takes much longer than cotton to become smelly than worn and it doesn't stain as easily. Since laundry was a major undertaking, these considerations were key. At least in the forms used by pre-modern society (people weren't running around in paper-thin merino underlayers), it was also considerably more durable. No, you can't put many kinds of wool in a washing machine without felting, but since there were no washing machines, that's irrelevant. And, despite what fibbing yarn-sellers will tell you, wool is either soft due to its inherent nature (or substantial processing using modern techniques) or it's not. Care doesn't make a meaningful difference.
posted by praemunire at 9:29 AM on January 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


Basically, with every labor-saving housekeeping device has come an increase in expectations in housekeeping standards. I thoroughly appreciate these devices, but that sure is a mysterious mystery of mystery.

Having at least one servant was a basic marker of mid-Victorian family respectability. It was very different from today.
posted by praemunire at 9:31 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Slighly related topic: itinerant knife grinders used to be common in European cities until quite recently. Many were from the Roma or Yenish communities. There are still 6 or 7 of them active in Paris today, but they're not getting any younger. The job is still in demand actually, but customers are mostly restaurant owners and hairdressers rather than housewives.
posted by elgilito at 9:32 AM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Such a wonderful post and amazing comments!

In my knife drawer is a strange and rusty knife, and every time someone helps me cook, they ask why it's even there. Back in the day when I was learning to cook, it was the sharp knife, and I chose it first. I never worried about how it looked. Now, it's more of a memory of something I don't exactly know. I think it goes back to my great grandmother, but it may be older. I'm keeping it.

My great grandfather had a small farm with horses and sustenance crops and livestock, but his main job was as a driver. Not a truck driver, but a driver of workhorses, transporting coal and firewood into the city. As far as I know, he was a mean person and an alcoholic, but really I don't know. My grandmother quit school at 14 to go to work as a housemaid in the city. There she was lucky to be hired by a liberal family who insisted that she continued at school and learned some basic language skills as well as typing. Her mother was a very good cook, cooking everything from scratch, and my gran had helped, and her employers taught her some more. When she married into a wealthy Jewish family, she learned to cook Kosher, because of the war, no-one had servants anymore. Eventually, my gran became an amazing cook, but she also left her past behind. "The sharp knife" and a chopping board were two of very few relics from that very poor small farm. I remember burning a ring on that chopping board which was really simple and not special, and Gran crying. She had kept it in perfect condition in 50+ years.

The last years of my grandmother's life, she yearned for her mother's cooking, and because she was very weak, she taught me how to. She'd explain how sometimes she would go with her dad on the wagon to the coast to get fish, often trading them with leeks. She told me Tuna had been commonplace and a popular replacement for meat. (She also love sushi) We'd make simple broths with dumplings, chicken stews, traditional pot roast chicken, oxtail stew, steamed leeks with melted butter. Fried fish served with berry-jellies and potatoes. Liver and onions. Pork sausages. Anchovies and onions. Lots of pickled cabbage, lots of mashed potatoes. Danish peasant food which was strangely similar to Roman "cucina povera", but also Northern.
All the time, she loved if I would cut up the vegs really small with "the sharp knife", on that board I'd "ruined".

Re.: eggs My stepmother was from a very fancy family, and she taught me to eat eggs with spoons cut from bulls horn. It seems that's the way it's done..
posted by mumimor at 10:03 AM on January 14, 2017 [31 favorites]


You had to send some of your utensils to be re-tinned periodically or the metal below the surface would be exposed from use and could poison the family, or merely stain everything.

We discovered cooking in copper pans a few years back, and they are wonderful. There also seems to be a thing now in artisanal carbon steel cooks' knives, and I bought my wife one of them.

Both of these are great and have made cooking more pleasurable, but I can now appreciate some of what people here are talking about: sharpening knives, not letting them dry wet, threatening the kids with Dire Penalties if they ever put them into the dishwasher, not using metal utensils with the pans, and having to send them for re-tinning every now and again.

And while on the subject, does anyone know of anyone in the UK apart from Sherwood who does re-tinning that doesn't cost the earth?
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 10:39 AM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Nearly every new hand saw you can buy today has super-hardened teeth, which work beautifully for a while but the steel is impossible to sharpen when they do eventually wear out, so the saw gets thrown away. Another negative; the tooth geometry isn't very efficient for long cuts along the grain that allow you to get your piece of wood to the width you need. Paul Sellers has in depth videos yt on sharpening older saws, which gets easier after a couple saws...and few things are nicer than a sharp saw.

They aren't impossible to sharpen. They are impossible to sharpen with steel files. This is an indication of the advantage of modern saws. In addition to holding a keen edge longer, they are also typically pretty inexpensive, so economically, it's sort of like sharpening a boxcutter blade. It can certainly be done, but why bother? The expensive saws that are easily hand sharpened means you pay for the privilege of spending the time to sharpen low hardness spring tempered steel. The advantage is that you get to keep the saw for a long time, but I find it to be a pretty empty advantage. I've not gotten attached to many saws in my lifetime. And if you're like me, that modern saw with super hardened teeth doesn't just get thrown out when the teeth no longer cut well. Flat spring steel stock is too useful to just throw away.

As far as tooth geometry, I have seen plenty of modern saws with ripsaw geometry teeth. Yeah, crosscut saws aren't the best for ripsawing.


The problem is that the very hard saws aren't carbide. They are not very high carbon steel and the hardness is accomplished by induction hardening. The teeth are shaped and sharpened and the edge is then exposed to a high frequency electrical field which very briefly heats a very thin surface layer to a very high temperature. The layer is so thin that the heat is very quickly conducted into the interior, leaving the outer layer very hard. When the saw eventually gets dull, you can in fact sharpen it with a diamond file, but when you do, the hardened layer is gone, leaving the unhardened core, which won't stay sharp.


Induction hardened blades need to be high enough carbon to be hardenable. If they are case hardened, that's a different thing, they don't need to be high carbon at all, though I can't see many saws being case hardened except for maybe one made by a blacksmith in a remote place where materials are limited.

While induction hardening, it is less likely that a saw would have so thin a case that it could be ground off easily, because saw blades tend to be quite thin, hardness would likely penetrate pretty deep, if not thoroughly. However, the effect on induction hardening the teeth does have a kind of similar effect to case hardening. The teeth alone are super hardened, the rest of the blade is left un-hardened (or more typically, left in a spring-like temper), which enhances the overall durability of the saw. If the whole blade were hardened in the same way, it would likely snap too easily when bent/flexed.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:46 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Thanks for the info on induction toothed rip saws. I'd looked at the chain hardware stores and never seen them.

While it may be possible to sharpen them a single time with specialty triangular diamond files (or maybe twice before getting to the softer steel which may or may not be of a suitable hardness to hold an edge), you'd also need a much larger flat diamond file to joint the teeth first....I don't see how anyone can make the case that these are intended by the buyers/sellers to anything but disposable.

That said, I have to admit that for a long time, hand saws have been treated as disposable. Local hardware stores used to have sharpening services but I bet that of the millions of saws sold around the world since the end of WW II, few ever got re-sharpened.
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:57 PM on January 14, 2017


  Anyone that's ever blackened a stove knows that's a puke job

amen to that; the zebrite got everywhere. You'd be sneezing black for days.

and yeah, I grew up with horn eggspoons too. There I go being Victorian again.

(If you're wanting to try a carbon-steel blade for not much money, Opinel still make some blades from it in France. I have a well-stropped Opinel that rivals scalpels for sharpness.)
posted by scruss at 3:33 PM on January 14, 2017


..."Cleaning the stoop was done on on your knees and involved extended hard scrubbing with a brush and, if I remember correctly, actually scrubbing with a stone to clean the grime. ( help me on this Jane the Brown)"...

posted by BlueHorse at 9:19 AM on January 14

Yep, that's right. Doorsteps were often scrubbed every morning and then whitened with chalk. A stone doorstep could be scrubbed with a handy lump of sandstone, a brick, or a patent stone. Bath bricks (TM) were made out of a fine silt that was good for polishing metal, so they wouldn't be used on a doorstep which didn't need grit so fine, but once a housewife had a reputation for a a well scrubbed doorstep numerous patent bricks became available to help her maintain her status. These stones often contained powdered caustic, such as lime or lye, and if you had to work with tar they might be the only way to get it off your hands, albeit while stripping the top layer of skin at the same time. One name for the door step scrubbing stone was a donkey stone (TM) which like the word kleenex was applied to pretty much any similar product regardless of the manufacturer.

You may have heard of holystoning the deck of a ship. In this case a holystone was a stone used for polishing wooden a wooden deck. The work may come from the practice of the work being done on while on your knees, but although a small holystone was called a prayer book and a big holystone was called a bible, sailors could not afford to get housemaid's knee, so before long holystoning was done with the assistance of a stick and in the "elephant walk" position, with the sailor's feet on the deck leaning over onto the stick so that his weight helped him press down harder.

You may wonder why they did all this frantic floor scrubbing and boot cleaning, and the answer lies in the composition of the roads. Paved roads were relatively rare. They did sometimes pave roads with bricks, or flagstones, or cobbles, but that was expensive and not entirely satisfactory. For one thing, people would steal the bricks for their own use, or pry up the cobbles to throw when they were rioting. This practice was so common that there is even a word for a piece of broken brick used as a missile. It is called a brickbat, as in the "Oranges and Lemons" rhyme that refers to "Brickbats and tiles, say the Bells of St. Giles." St. Giles was a very bad neighbourhood and prone to riots.

Cobbles could also be dangerous as they were sometimes knocked around by horse's hooves. People were not infrequently hit by these stones. A paved road was not entirely a good thing. Also, iron wheels and iron horses shoes could be extremely noise on rock.

But leaving the road entirely undressed was not practical either. Depending on the weather the road could become incredibly dusty, or turn into a watercourse and the entire roadbed wash away, or merely turn into a bog. Drainage naturally followed the roads. Every horse that plodded down the street left manure. People often emptied their slops into the street too, or stepped outside to relieve themselves. Women had long skirts and divided drawers. All they had to do was to spread their legs a little bit and try not to be obvious. Men on the other hand had to whip it out and point it somewhere. Curiously, and in direct contrast to the current custom they would probably aim for the centre of the street. They were less modest - I mean, come on, every twenty minutes you saw a horse letting go - and they disliked the idea of pissing up against the wall, as that would be an insult to the householder, so they aimed for whatever looked like the deepest run off channel.

And sometimes the road was used not only as a sewer but as an abattoir. Pudding Lane in London got its name from the pigs' puddings thrown into the street - discarded entrails that the butchers of Pudding Lane considered unfit to sell, and given that they put everything but the squeal into pork sausages, the entrails they considered unfit to sell would have been unappealing indeed.

(You may have seen pictures of roads in England and other places where the unpaved road has sunk as much as five feet below the banks on either side. Roads that are as deep sunk as that were drovers roads. Since Roman times cattle were driven down from the North of Scotland and all points south, taking these drovers roads to get to the big market in London. It wasn't carriages or wagons or people's feet that wore these roads down so deep, it was the hooves of millions of cattle over centuries. Drovers roads are country roads that run amid pastures where the cows could be allowed to graze overnight.)

As with the type of sandstone used in the earliest times, what they used to dress the road entirely depended on what was locally available. Clinkers were used - the residue rock that is left when coal is burned. If you used clinkers the entire neighbourhood turned black with coal dust. Limestone gravel was good but not as easy to come by since turning solid limestone into gravel was expensive and they had even more lucrative uses for limestone blocks. If you needed to quiet the traffic down, you could throw down layers of straw to muffle the hooves and wagon or carriage wheels. This was done when someone was dying. Straw was a very temporary dressing as it would get scattered and blown away due to how light it was. Still it was something that would hold down the mud and was fairly cheap.

If you could get it, clay was ideal. It would bake hard in the summer sun, but not so hard that the windows would get broken all the time by the stones that were thrown up. It would dissolve quite a bit when it rained, but not as badly as plain undressed dirt. Clay sheds rain better than dirt, so if you built the road properly it would mostly run off, unless you had heavy rain for days. Of course if you did have heavy rain for days the saturated clay would turn into a thick slippery mess rather like liquid concrete. But it usually didn't rain that heavily and nothing was perfect.

If you have read some of my earlier ramblings about what-they-did-in-historic-times you may remember me mentioning a mixture of mud, clay, horse dung and straw. That same gloop was used to plaster wattle houses as when it dried, it dried hard. In medieval times and earlier they made their houses out of it. But they key factor I want to point out here is that it dried hard, almost like concrete. So there you have your nice doorstep encased in a crust of muck that is part manure.

If you were well to do, you might have a small blade, sharp side up mounted on your doorstep. This was the bootscraper, with which you tried to take the worst of the manure and clay off your boots before you came inside.

There is a scene in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories where Mr. Holmes remarks upon the fact that the side of a boot has been badly cut up by a servant who was using a knife to clean the boots. To do that you have to be really trying, hacking away hard at clay that has turned solid. That's precisely what you would have to do.

When it wasn't rock-solid clay, it was dust. Clay dust, earth dust, coal dust - do you have any idea how wonderful it is to have paved roads and sidewalks? The dust inside the house would get so bad that the housewife might resort to a watering pot. A watering pot was a ceramic pot with a flat bottom that had numerous small holes in it and a small opening at the top, large enough to fill the pot, but small enough to block the top opening with your thumb. As long as your thumb was firmly over the opening the water would not drain out of the pot because it would create a vacuum. As soon as you moved your thumb the water would sprinkle out. You used this pot, in the house, on the floor to dampen down the dust so that you could sweep it up, or just to prevent it from rising so that it wouldn't be as hard to breath!
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:20 PM on January 14, 2017 [46 favorites]


kyrademon: "> "And swapping it for the new hot nonstop miserable drudgery of THE FUTURE!"

... a message written on the magic communications, information retrieval, and task-performance device built of materials only invented in the relatively recent past.
"

I did NOT say I do NOT engage in such drudgery.
posted by Samizdata at 10:33 PM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


During retreats at the zendo, I am usually assigned kitchen prep for work duty, because the Tenzo and I work very well together. We don't have a lot of money for equipment, so our knife rack is mostly stamped stainless steel, and of course they don't corrode and are easy to sharpen but dull quickly. We do have one carbon steel knife that must be at least a few decades old. It's not anything remarkable in its alloy or construction, just a solid workhorse. But it is my favorite knife to use for prep of non-acidic veggies. Oh man it just keeps slicing as thin as you want, and all it asks in return is to be kept clean & dry (we don't let it build up a patina- many different ppl doing dishes). Every once in a long while it needs to be sharpened (a PITA, but it doesn't ever become dangerously dull in the meantime).

I treasure it. Nobody leaves it in the sink or tosses it in a drawer, because they all know I will swoop down from the heavens and share my passion for carbon steel knife care & safety tips.

Nobody.

Or ... next meal YOU use the $10 Faberware stainless steel grocery store special to prep all the veggies for a silent mob of hungry Buddhists.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:43 AM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'm seeing more and more tests and reviews basically saying that chef knives made from more recent extremely hard stainless steel alloys can match carbon steel's performance and edge-holding ability.

I've got a couple of Global knives (not super-expensive top of the line knives, but decent) that only need to see my waterstones once ever 1.5 or 2 years, with regular maintenance in between with a good honing steel. I can easily do the tomato test with either of them. They're a joy to use, and while I take care to keep them clean I don't have to worry about the sort of finicky upkeep required by carbon steel knives.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:38 AM on January 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


mumimor: "A small spoon made from horn is the traditional utensil with which to enjoy a boiled egg at its best - metal spoons are said to taint the flavour."

Doesn't have to be bull's horn-- all cows have horns unless they are removed for feed-lot safety.
posted by ohshenandoah at 8:51 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


(If you're wanting to try a carbon-steel blade for not much money, Opinel still make some blades from it in France. I have a well-stropped Opinel that rivals scalpels for sharpness.)

See also Mora: the fairly indestructable doing stuff in the woods knife. Also Hultafors as a for an almost equal quality budget alternative if you don't feel like lashing out the fancy money (~ £15) a Mora costs.
posted by Buntix at 8:54 AM on January 16, 2017


As a knifemaker, I always include a "care and feeding" of a high-carbon steel knife when I give or sell one -- most people are unaware that even if you don't use it, you still need to give it a good oiling or greasing every so often. I'll usually include a little jar of a beeswax and mineral oil mix I've found works as a long-term preserver, so you only have to remove the old coating and apply a thin layer of new (if you can see the coating, you've used too much, buff until you can't see the coating) every 6 months or so. I note that for Japanese the standard is pretty robust: every month, you first put a piece of paper in your mouth to avoid drooling/breathing on the blade, dismount the hilt and guard using a special dedicated set of tools, coat the blade lightly with a fine stone powder, the same kind of stone used for the finest finish, using a small pom-pom of silk to evenly distribute the powder. The powder absorbs the old oil and is wiped off with a silk cloth, then new choji (clove) oil applied and used to coat the blade evenly, then the blade is remounted in its fittings and returned to storage. Some temples in Japan have hundreds of these blades, and each one gets this treatment every month, until the blade is worn to the point where it cannot be polished or sharpened anymore. While a high carbon chef's knife (my favorite kind of knife to make) doesn't require this level of care, I note that Japanese chefs, and indeed most of their craftsmen, take care to sharpen the blades before each use, and after each use clean and oil the blade to get it ready for the next.
posted by Blackanvil at 11:23 AM on January 16, 2017 [8 favorites]


Also, I meant to add this earlier but I forgot, and now I don't know who's still watching this thread. I've mentioned this a few times, but this information freakin' changed my world when it comes to knives. Or you can buy his book, which looks even more comprehensive.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:32 PM on January 16, 2017 [8 favorites]


I note that for Japanese the standard is pretty robust: every month, you first put a piece of paper in your mouth to avoid drooling/breathing on the blade, dismount the hilt and guard using a special dedicated set of tools,

This is for bladed weapons, and mostly useless silliness to keep the hired blades busy between wars.

In a modern Japanese fine cuisine kitchen, all the knives are whetted daily on a progression of wet stones by the head chef before prep, and then scoured at the end of service by the line cooks using them. European chefs would be stropping or steeling the hell out of their German or French style chef's knife between dishes, except for actual French chefs, who use the little "utility knife" so derided by knife experts. Seriously, Jaques Pepin only uses the smaller-than-the-chef's-knife/bigger-than-the-paring-knife "utility" knife for everything. No shame!

Actual professional culinary cutting "on the line" here in the USA involves a very dedicated prep cook and a giant $15 Old Hickory brand carbon steel Butcher Knife sharpened to a fare-thee-well that reduces onions entire into little bitty onion dandruff in less time than it took you to read that. Really.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:51 PM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


a giant $15 Old Hickory brand carbon steel Butcher Knife

Well yeah, but if my own (admittedly limited) restaurant experience is any gauge, that's because it's essentially a throwaway item: a "professional" knife sharpener will be hired to come in every so often and grind the ever-loving fuck out of those cheap knives with an aggressive high-speed grinding wheel, so that after a year or two the blade's worn down to a nub and the knife needs replacing. A cook who spends a pretty penny on their own cutlery never lets that hack anywhere near them, unless they are a very great fool indeed.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:53 PM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


I haven't found anything more about either why people valued polished knives so much or why knife- and boot-cleaning were marked male.

I would guess that there was a half-realistic, half-symbolic assumption that dirt and corrosion were all poisonous. (Remember Tom Sawyer afraid of blood poisoning from verdigris on a pin? Not unfounded.) Unpicking beliefs about iron from control of the general filthiness of everything in a world of open fires and sewers is beyond me.

There isn't nearly as much searchable material online for the pre-nineteenth-century (although EMMO and its crowdsourced transcriptions are working on it!), so I don't know even when knife-cleaning became a footman's job. It could be left over from carving as a complex skill. (That last, from 1503, tells the butler-and-pantler to see that the knives are polished; this seems to be work done before graduating to carver.)
posted by clew at 2:35 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh, I dropped one of the direct references! A footman's book on how to be a footman, including directions for cleaning knives without a Kent's machine.

now I think I've finished the braindump.
posted by clew at 4:05 PM on January 18, 2017 [1 favorite]


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