I thought they seemed similar, but didn’t know the full story behind why that was, and why I was finding these Sabatier brands most of the time instead of the myriad of others from the same time period. Mid-19th to early 20th C when there were hundreds of different “Sabatier” brands and makers in France. I say ‘most of the time’ as if they appear if you shake a box upside down at any garage sale, flea market, or thrift shop. They are still hard to find, especially in good shape, but at least here they overrepresent other Franch makers of their time. A lot of Sabatiers look similar in Thiers; they share many independent workshops, and craftspeople move around, spreading trade secrets and work techniques.

Recently, I connected the dots between these two makers, altough, I’m not the first to do so. There’s an interesting story that’s inspiring me right now in the current iteration of Bernal Cutlery, as we work to set up our own manufacturing here in San Francisco. The story of these two knives highlights the importance of the collaboration between manufacturing and retailing in shaping the development of culinary knives.

Jean Sabatier moved to Paris during the French Revolution in the 1790s and, in the early 1800s, married Marie Sauzet, the daughter of a successful Paris surgical tool maker. Jean descended from the Sabatier family of Le Moûtier in Thiers, with master cutlers recorded as far back as 1615 (like many knife-making families in Thiers with old roots in the craft). After witnessing the 1819 National Exhibition in Paris, where expensive, finely finished cutlery, surgical tools, and embroidery scissors made in Paris dominate the offerings, and nothing is offered to working people, his Thiers sensibilities kick in. He sees an opening for professional chef and butcher knives made in Thiers for Paris, which at the time is experiencing explosive growth in à la carte restaurants.

The idea is planted in Jean’s mind and set in motion to establish a finishing workshop in Paris for forged and ground knives coming from Thiers, but it is not until much later, in the 1830s, when his son Jean (‘le Parisien’) Sabatier joins him after he has also become a master cutler, that the business takes root. With more established production facilities in Thiers, built and inherited, and a shop at 84 Rue St Honore becoming the Paris flagship shop for knives made in Thiers, knives forged and ground in Thiers are finished in Paris at nearby family-owned workshops and retailed several blocks away. The combination of Thiers’ ability to produce affordable working knives for cooks and to retail them in the heart of Paris’s restaurant culture is a recipe for success.

Several brands will sprout from this origin story, including the Main Ouvert (Open Hand) with 84 St Honore marked on the blade, as well as Sabatier Trompette, an older Thiers trademark purchased by the family and put into large-scale production.

In the Mid-19th century, the shop at 84, St Honore, Paris, was rented and run outside the Sabatier family, but was supplied by the same production, with finishing work still being done in Paris, most likely up to the latter part of the 19th century. By the 20th century, the sold-at-this-shop items were only made in Thiers, it seems. The Rue St Honore 84 shop was a key retailer in Paris, and many of its knives have found their way around the world, with this mark recognized as a somewhat common old Sabatier mark in the United States, Argentina, etc. As to whether they actually exported, or whether cooks travelled to France to purchase them, cannot be specified at the time of writing this. The fact that they marked knives “made in France” in English for the US market after the 1890s, however, suggests direct export.

The influential Sabatier La Trompette had found its way across the globe by the late 19th century, serving as an important ambassador for Thiers knife-making, and a marker of the widespread footprint of French cuisine. A gold medal was won in 1878, referenced on the blade, and retained in the La Trompette and Sabatier Trumpet markings. After 1891, the mark ‘France’ was added to allow them to be imported into the USA in compliance with new U.S. import laws.

Later, owners of the La Trompette brand added their names to the markings. Dufresne was added to the markings until 1920, when the company was purchased by M. Pouzet, whose name appears on production from 1920 to 1940. In 1940, with the Nazi invasion of France, production stopped until after the war, when La Trompette was reborn as Sabatier Trumpet Brand, still with the 1878 in the marks. Sabatier Trumpet made OEM knives for Ekco under its Ancienne Maison line in forged stainless steel, and for Forschner in carbon and stainless steel.

The story trails off as their production and distribution become a bit less distinct, but the most important lasting impact was made. As the à la carte restaurant concept spread like wildfire from its origin in Paris in the late 18th and early 19th century, the French chef’s knife spread with it. While the Rue St Honore 84 and Trompette knives show up consistently, their influence dwarfs their production numbers. Every knife-making area of the West follows suit from this influence, offering its own version of the ‘Cuisine Massif’ or ‘Nogent style’ chef knife from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. And of course, we know how good an idea the à la carte restaurant was, as it is now ubiquitous worldwide. Arguably, the chef knife came for quite a ride on the à la carte restaurant’s coattails and is now too ubiquitous; a good argument can be made for the marriage of Paris and Thiers in this.

Olle had some issues with his back and knees that were giving him a hard time, but he was otherwise so present and sharp that it didn’t quite fit when I heard he passed away in his sleep, suddenly, on this last October 31st. Present and sharp leaves out a lot of what made him a special person, it was easy to pick up on the fact that he was enthusiastic about a lot of things, especially things related to craft and history and I got the feeling he had a real understanding of how environments made people feel based on a perceptiveness born of a true affection for people.

At our first formal meeting he instantly understood our intention to include the historical overlay of industrial process and skilled handwork in our manufacturing project. We had chatted in the shop over the years, especially when he came in to get gifts; it was always interesting to see which books he picked out, he had an eye for Hitohira Kikuchiyo Ren and Ashi, and usually Swedish fish for himself. He was one of the first people to buy our Greenfield Gyuto the first day it came out, getting one for himself and one for Loretta Keller. About a year afterward after we were starting our current expansion and had got a space for our manufacturing and through Loretta’s recommendation, I found myself in the downstairs meeting room at his workshop and design studio in the Dogpatch neighborhood, surrounded by his hot sauce collection (see the what’s in my basket video with Olle to get a visual of this collection). It was so inspiring mapping out our workshop footprint with Olle, Kelly, and Eli. I am pretty certain that it was the influence of this hot sauce collection that inspired Kelly’s idea of a ‘knife library’ in the foyer of our manufacturing space as a reference for historical industrial-handmade knives.

From the standpoint of Olle’s work over the decades, ours is a tiny project that he didn’t get a chance to actually see past the initial plan, but I treasure the time I spent working with him and the confidence that his enthusiasm in our manufacturing project gave me is with me today. Kelly and I were scheduled to have lunch with him in Dogpatch near his studio the Monday after he passed away and a part of me hasn’t accepted his passing and still looks forward to the discussion we would have had. In a way, that discussion is still indirectly possible after his passing, through the execution of his design, and I’m sure that once we are finally working there, making knives, in lots of subtle ways Olle’s design will make observations and suggestions about how we interact in the manufacturing workshop. In this, it occurs to me that all great craftspeople leave an unfinished conversation with their work that we get to inherit and continue. Thank you, Olle.

-Josh Donald 1/13/26

As I was sorting a bin of knives from a collection I had purchased, one looked familiar, not just in that I knew what it was or recognized a piece of its anatomy, this one I knew the exact knife from a while ago. It was a big carbon steel 14” American-made chef knife from LF&C with a maple handle. I recognized a little bump carved into the inside of one of the scales, where the wood scale met the bolster. LF&C never used maple like this, but it had the original 1930s rivets, which had been carefully dug out of the old handle and put back to use. I had made the handle nearly 20 years ago, and it ended up in a collection that I had recently purchased, waiting nearly 20 years to be reunited with me.

When I made this handle, my workshop was in the back of an apartment over an Italian restaurant on Cortland Ave, in Bernal Heights. I forget the name of the restaurant, but the owners were a starchy older Italian couple who, among other indignities, blamed us for their rat problem. We tried to be friendly with them when we moved in, but it didn’t take long to recognize they were assholes. I worked at a little 1950s wood school desk in the back room, facing a window looking out over the fences, back yards, and the backs of the other houses and apartments on our block.

As I worked, if I spilled any water, it would run off the back of the table and pool at the back wall as the room slumped off the building at about 5 degrees, as if the building had this room in a sack over its back. Despite anxieties about money, I was having a good time with my routine of taking care of 1-year-old Charlie, when Kelly was working freelance, and starting Bernal Cutlery; sharpening and restoring vintage knives. As I was beginning to get my chops down, sharpening, I started buying old knives at the flea market on Sunday mornings. I learned to get there early, bring a flashlight, and small bills. I had a regular stop with Frank, who saved a small, yellow-and-brown 1950s hard-case suitcase of old knives and maybe an extra box or two for me to go through before anyone else would get a crack at them. He had a regular, fresh supply most weeks. Stainless knives were $5, and carbon steel $10 each for years before the price crept up a little. I never tried to bargain him down, and he kept the grubby hands of the other early birds out of his boxes before I showed up around 5:30 or 6. But I had to get there then, the one day I showed up at 10am to look at knives, he looked at me like I was crazy and told me, “You gotta get here early, kid”. I never came late again.

Before long, I was re-handling some of the knives I had amassed that had less-than-ideal handles. With no dedicated machinery or equipment outside of a jeweler’s saw, hand drill, and a vice, I found making handles offered some big challenges with lining up tangs and scales neatly, as well as getting the rivets set cleanly. There were some lumpy first handles made from oak off a shipping pallet. As I progressed, the woods got nicer and despite the long hours it took to complete a somewhat irregular handle, I became a little obsessed and started doing other knives, even taking off handles from knives with imperfect but still very usable handles. Old carbon steel Sabatiers were always a favorite; the old black plastic handles almost always had tight cracks, they would have held for another 40 years but the imperfection invited a new handle. I started buying wood scales for knife handles and very carefully prying apart the old handles to preserve the original rivets if possible. Carving out a circular seating for the rivet heads was a challenge; this is done quickly and easily with a machine in a real production setting and does not take three hours, but back then, so long as Charlie didn’t wake up from his nap, I was happy to whittle them out. I discovered that thick copper wire as pins didn’t require this carving and was a lot easier to manage, but sometimes a handle scale cracked at the last tap of the hammer as the copper mushroomed out. If I had stopped to do any math on the time I took vs. the $ I made, I would have given up sooner, but for several years I did quite a bit of these.

Frank and I would chat a little as I went through the knives, and he told me stories of being in the antiques business in the 70s and 80s and running coke in Southern California. Frank was in his late 60s or early 70s, and I thought he looked like a combination of Jeff Bridges and Charles Bukowski. In my memory, he always had an old Hawaiian shirt on, the kind that one would be contractually required to own to have such stories. Frank had a generally kind and easygoing air, and he was knowledgeable about a wide swath of antiques, which is required in his line of business, aside from owning a van and a few Hawaiian shirts. Sometimes other dealers at the market would bring Persian rugs or antique furniture they had just bought for him to ID or to appraise. He would be repaid with a tip that so-and-so in booth such-and-such had something he should check out, and he would spring into action and dart off. If it was a good tip and the price was right, he would come back with something in tow and, in hushed tones, tell his girlfriend Jan who ran the booth with him, what he just scored.

This went on nearly every Sunday morning for several years; Frank was there just about every week until he wasn’t there quite as much, and then Jan would run their booth. As time went on there was less stuff, and she generally had less of a command of things than Frank did. The knives were fresh less and less often, and finally, a few years out, after I hadn’t seen them at the market for a while, I got a call from Jan and I made one last buy with Frank and Jan. It was down in San Jose (at Jan’s daughter’s apartment?) and Frank was there in hospice care, in a hospital bed and in my memory still in the Hawaiian shirt. Frank had told me years before in a semi-dismissive tone that I was “still shittin’ yellow” as I was grousing about something or other. I was probably 31 or 32. I must have felt old and wizened, having just escaped my booze and drug-filled 20s with new sobriety and a young family. I thought “still shittin’ yellow” was a fun turn of phrase that I was happy to add to my collection, especially as I knew intimately what it meant, changing diapers for a newborn not too long before this. I wasn’t sure if it actually applied to me at the time, but as we said our goodbyes and I thanked him for all his help and generosity over the years, I knew what he meant.

After I said my goodbyes and thanked Frank for looking out for me, I left with knives I had already seen several times and passed on and paid more than I would have paid normally. While things were still relatively lean, I wasn’t trying to turn $138 into groceries and bills for the week and still have buying money the following week anymore. Leaving the stucco and concrete apartment complex with the yellow and brown suitcase put a period at the end of “still shittin’ yellow”.

A few years in, before Frank passed, I had a good sense of what different knives would fetch; there were a few surprises and one or two big paydays (to me at least at the time). Occasionally, while I was still learning the value of things, I would find that one would slip under my radar. I generally knew I fucked up and sold something for too cheap, or had found something really good when a guy in LA named Ralph would buy it on eBay. He had been selling vintage knives on eBay for many years and seemed to have a wealth of knowledge, and about 8000 knives up for sale. He wrote descriptions for his knives in a rich, florid prose like a gourmand carnival barker. Every other knife was described as ‘superb’, but a good many actually were. Even though every other knife was “superb” and “the finest” amidst the superlatives and salesmanship, he was a good source of knowledge. Info on details of construction I picked up from him was, in fact, later backed up by info I got from old timers on trips to the towns of origin of these knives; Thiers and Solingen, especially. But one of the first things I learned was actually a little humbling; don’t ship knives in envelopes, Ralph hated that and I got a vinegary note from him about my choice of a bubblewarp envelope and cereal box as shipping materials. A little later after I stopped shipping in bubble wrap and cereal boxes we briefly discussed me sharpening for him after he got some knives from me that I had sharpened, but nothing came of it. He stayed with an old institutional type sharpening shop in Downtown L.A. and some guys that worked out of trucks I believe. We never really chatted all that much or became friendly, but I did get to learn a lot from Ralph (aside from not shipping knives in envelopes) and always knew I had a good find if Ralph snatched it up.

I had never met Ralph in person, and I thought he was a lot older than he was. A friend of mine from the flea market, who also sold old knives to Ralph, had told me he was in his 90s. Maybe I misheard “it’s like he’s in his 90s”. He told a few stories about Ralph that made me imagine him with a maroon or gold velour tracksuit and a white, thinning pompadour set off with a gold cornicello necklace. Better still, I had a Sam Peckinpah / Guy Ritchie freeze frame shot of him squinting through cigar smoke with a smirk, loading boxes of ‘primo’ vintage knives into the trunk of a 1970s Cadillac with a red leather interior.

We got a call at the shop several years ago from a guy in New Jersey asking if we appraised vintage knives, after I asked if he could send some photos he hesitated and said, “there’s a lot”. He went on to tell me the knives had come from his late brother’s estate who had lived in L.A. and maybe I knew him; his name was Ralph. I was a little floored, but it’s a small world with vintage culinary knives, and I was calculating how many years it had been since I was told that Ralph was in his 90s, he must be pushing 110 or 115 at that point. I was put in touch with Ralph’s sister, who also lived in LA, and before long I was flying down to LA to look at some knives.

I get down to L.A. to meet Ralph’s sister and her husband to check out the knives. I grew up in LA but haven’t spent much time there since I was a teenager, and for decades, I felt I had to be in opposition to it; as if my hostility was necessary to prevent me from being teleported back there. I noticed that back in 2019, it had softened when I went down to do a reading at the downtown LA library for the Culinary Historians of Southern California. I stayed with a friend from SF who had moved to my childhood neighborhood, Echo Park. Walking around my old neighborhood, I felt I understood what geomagnetic location must feel like for birds; it was so familiar it seemed to be in my DNA. While 2019 Echo Park was different than the 1973 to 1986 Echo Park I knew, everything was familiar from the feeling of the air, to the ambient sound of the freeway and helicopters to the mix of smells; jacaranda flowers, unpicked avocados, lemons rotting on dry grass, and the far-off smell of carnitas and dryer sheets. The quality of the light was exactly the same as when I was little, but everything looked much smaller, and the blocks seemed much shorter. There was no more Pioneer Chicken, but the House of Spirits Liquor store, where my 13 and 14-year-old punk rock friends and I used to shoulder tap to get someone to buy us beer, was still there with its amazing 1930s neon sign.

I took a cab to their house in West L.A., near where my mom last lived in Los Angeles before leaving herself after living in LA for over 60 years, her family moving there in the 1950s from the Bronx at age 10. I had spent a year living in West LA in 8th grade, I resented leaving East Hollywood for square suburban West LA but it grew on me apparently. The landscape was also immediately familiar. The Tudor and Spanish houses from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s with spongy green grass out front, streets laid out in flat grids with the old streetlights from the same period.

I would visit my mom in this West LA neighborhood after I left LA, and then again as a young adult, usually only for a few days. I loved my mom, but LA always made me feel itchy. This time, I was back there as a grown man without enough hair to grow any more than 1/5th of a mohawk. I met Raph’s sister and brother-in-law and had lunch at a diner near my old house that I went to as a kid. There was a short shipping container in their driveway with a bunch of boxes of knives, I started going through them writing down my appraisals but the huge numbers of them made me think about the upcoming return flight that night, there was no way I was going to get through these plus what ever was at his space downtown. But we got in the car and got into traffic. I remember traffic from being a kid but it was never like this. It was the middle of a weekday when it should have been a 11-15 minute trip from West LA to downtown and it was nearly an hour on the packed freeway.

We got off the freeway eventually and went through downtown. I grew up not far from downtown on the other side of Elysian Park, which we drove past to get to Raph’s studio, a cluster of 1940s industrial buildings encircled with a 12’ chainlink fence. Ralph’s workspace included a 20’ shipping container with about 40 large plastic bins full of knives plus assorted crumbling cardboard boxes, and corrugated white plastic mail bins also, with knives. One box was full of the kind of mellow gold that 15 years prior I would have been more than happy to have woken up at 5 am to find a few of. Other bins held the rustiest, rattiest dross that would be what was waded past to get to the good ones (hopefully). Ralph was a prolific picker and I can tell that he had been buying large lots of old knives (presumably at a good price) for only several of their contents and didn’t get rid of the rest. I was looking at decades of collecting, dealing, and delaying. I needed a mask and some gloves. It was super dusty and there had been critters enjoying the bounty apparently. A pellet gun rifle in the corner was used for sport hunting rats, I learned. While it was springtime, it was getting hot in the shipping container, and the dust was intense. There was no way I was going to be able to appraise all these knives one by one, so we came up with a general figure for the lot, and I rushed off to sit in traffic in a cab to get my return flight to San Francisco. Sweaty, dirty, and totally ecstatic. I had just landed a lifetime of Sunday mornings after years of frustration of getting up at 5am and being tired all day on a scarce day off to find nothing of significance.

It took two trips of movers with a big truck to get all the boxes and bins up to San Francisco. We waited a a month or two in between loads so I could sort and organize, it was weeks of going through knives, culling the better ones to refurbish and sell in the shop, separating ones to be saved for either reference and or a larger project, categorize those into either place of origin or type, and then roughly sort the ones to be sold in the bargain bins.

I learned that Ralph would take his two nephews on epic journeys around the LA, often on the premise of lunch, “lets get Laotian food, I know a place in the Valley” would become a day-long journey, stopping off at dozens of thrift shops and junk stores looking for knives before eventually eating hours and hours later at a spot nearly outside of the greater Los Angeles sprawl.

Hearing about the time he spent with his nephews showed me another side Ralph, hearing about the dishes he would prepare for family gatherings gave me a feel for what a maniac he was for food and did his best to always bring his family into his love of it. I got a chance to see his goofier side with cartoon notes from his nephews telling him to ‘stop farting’.

Finally, all of the knives are up with me in San Francisco, and while we have sold a number of them at the shop, there are still so many more to clean up (it’s a lot of work from semi-rusty dull knife to restored knife in the shop floor and on our website) or sort for the bargain bins. Often, once I start working on them, there’s something to research or a mark I don’t know, and then if I’m lucky, there’s something new to learn. While I never had the opportunity to do so directly, I would love to be able to ask Ralph about some of the harder to pin down knives, what his guesses are on the makers of some, what’s the story on the hoard of new old stock Italian knives, and who did the other re-handled knives,, although one of which I do know about for cerain, and is now back home with me, still shittin yellow.

On a Thursday in October, when we were finalizing the What’s in My Basket for Olle Lundberg, Tim, who is the brainchild behind the series, was finalizing the edits with Olle and got a thumbs up. Then Olle made lunch plans with Josh and I for the following Monday. Of course, this was only to hear the next day that Olle had passed away. It was a shock to us all, and we will miss him very much. I wrote a piece of prose tribute to Olle, and I’m including it here.

If you did not know Olle or the legacy he leaves behind, he was a force in the world of architecture and design, and in the lives of people who know him. He designed some of the most iconic restaurants in San Francisco: The Slanted Door, Mourad, and Flour + Water. We were over-the-moon excited to work with him and his particular skill in creating workshop spaces. Olle was our architect for the 69 Dubuce building, where we are installing our production facility. He leaves a brilliant legacy, a talented team, and friends and family behind.

*A Member of The Order of the Unified Heart is a reference to Leonard Cohen’s “society” of people who are of the arts and are like-mindedly kind and generous. It was never a formal society, of course, but rather an idea for Cohen who really knew who his people were. Olle Lundberg was my people.

I am a devout agnostic. Sometimes I will jokingly offer up an explanation to this by saying, “just in case there is a god out there, I don’t want to piss it off.” This way, I’m sort of safe, and I get to be vain in maintaining my intellectual integrity to those who might judge me. But as I have gotten older, less vain, and accrued life and time under my belt, I am ready to square with someone, should they ask what I really mean by this position.

I will level up that it comes from a deep sense of humility that I have been afforded in life, which I am so grateful for. The longer I am here, the more life I experience, but the less I know. Life has shaken most of the ‘knowing’ out of me.

The term agnostic was coined in 1869 by British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, combining the Greek a (“without”) and gnosis (“knowledge”). This is the simple etymological definition, but one can easily get lost in rabbit holes looking at its epistemic and philosophical roots around the lack of knowledge or the absence of quantifiable answers to way too many questions. For me, however, my position fits well with describing the human experience. I think this is the space where art and culture are born.

If I were pressed to guess where what god is by pointing my finger, I would point at that which can most often be seen in art, poetry, music, and the many expressions of our human experience. It’s the art that doesn’t have words to describe it; the song that you never get tired of hearing; the painting you are moved by; or the utter awe of how, as humans, we can build great things. It’s just too much to know; the totality of it is immense. David Hickey, one of the greats, who passed away in 2021, frequently pointed out that art’s greatest ability is to exist where language fails. But this phenomenon also seems to fall under simple, everyday, almost cliché experiences like great meals with friends and family, stopping for sunsets, being in nature, holding babies, and eating cake. It’s hard to describe in words what it was about Olle that was so wonderful, but I can say that it is between these things and then also all of them at once, almost as if he had these things on his fingertips.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because, right before Olle passed away, he sort of dropped the statement that, at the, time felt a little awkward and personal; he said he was an atheist. This was in context of a casual conversation about an old and rather large wood plank Josh and I noticed while walking out of his conference room. He told Josh and me about the project it belonged to: a church redesign he was planning. The large splayed tree plank had been sitting in his studio for a very long time, and he referenced that he had probably held onto it way too long. He said it was a significantly older tree, and that although he was an atheist, he was very excited to work with this church design exactly because the altar would be made of it. Moreover, it would be the centerpiece for the people both inside and outside of the building and the most interesting grain and presentation would be facing the people outside. At the time, I thought, ‘fucking brilliant’. I left there thinking to myself that he was telling us that he wasn’t a believer, but that he did believe in that tree and the people that it bears witness to in all its iterations. He put his whole body into talking to us about this part of the project and showing us the wood plank as we walked around it in the Lundberg workshop.

I thought about this and many other conversations I had with Olle, and I realized that most atheists that I know talk about what I suspect god to be a lot, and do so with such intimacy and native language as their main currency. Artists. Writers, poets or those that really hear and see deeply, like my friend Mario, who lets me know he’s an atheist any chance he gets, but is a prolific storyteller of beautiful sunsets, reports of crying at the symphony, and loves his people with such passion, integrity, and care. This language is how I know my people. Olle was this way too, so enthusiastic, with all the lights on behind his eyes. We are heartbroken that such a larger-than-life leader in our creative community is gone too soon. Olle was a San Francisco treasure and will certainly be missed by all of us here at the shop.

Of special notation. “Enthusiasm” comes from the Greek entheos - en (in) and theos (god). It literally means “possessed by a god” or “god within.”

If you want to see Olle’s What’s in My Basket Video, you can see it here.

“Within about 5 to 8 years, it seems one of these dealers heard from someone that a Sabatier sold for $100 online, and after that, every Sabatier became worth $100, and in the eyes of many, every chef knife became a Sabatier.”

When I first started buying vintage knives at the flea market, I had a few prearranged stops: people who would regularly find knives and liked dealing with me, and I liked dealing with them, too. Otherwise, I would walk around asking the sellers if they had any knives. In the early days from 2005 to 2008, it was common for people to say, “No, but I do have some cook knives”. Most people asking around for knives at 6 am back then were looking for old military, pocket, and hunting knives. Culinary knives were considered chaff, often sold for $1 to $5 because they were deemed to have little value beyond utilitarian use. Within about 5 to 8 years, it seems one of these dealers heard from someone that a Sabatier sold for $100 online, and after that, every Sabatier became worth $100, and in the eyes of many, every chef' knife became a Sabatier. Deceased people whose families had no interest in their stuff and people who didn’t pony up on their storage unit bills started having fewer and fewer good knives in their stuff, and eventually, the volume of good culinary knives made their way less and less to the market. This is the short version of my small microcosm as seen from a Bay Area perspective; maybe it's different elsewhere, but this is my experience.

“There would be a feeding frenzy as good stuff was available to be found from about 5 am to 7:30 am.”

There would be a feeding frenzy as good stuff was available to be found from about 5 am to 7:30 am. The fresh goods were put out first thing in the morning. By then, the best stuff had been snatched up by the professional pickers before the general public arrived around 8 or 9. At this time, sometimes a second tier of boxes would come out, and something good would turn up. By this time, I had been walking for 3 or 4 hours and would be getting hungry, and the tiredness would be setting in, my eyes would feel dry, and my face would hurt from sleep deprivation. This feeling was a familiar feeling at this time in my life, with kids born in ‘04 and ‘08, little sleep, and the necessity to work long hours when I could. Sunday was especially long hours, even if a baby had been up the night before; getting in a good haul was crucial in those days. A couple of bags heavy with knives by 7 or 8 meant I could go home early and start cleaning that week’s finds. If I got started early enough, I might sell enough to have a good buying budget by next Sunday and even spend lavishly on rent, bills, and food.

“I would walk on by if I saw them, keep scanning for the telltale handle of a chef knife, a box that could contain pocket knives, or a box of kitchen utensils that could have a stowaway knife in it”

I learned what to pass up, mostly the hard way, buying a knife for $10 and selling it for $8 at auction, for instance, or that any knife with a chef’s name on it would probably get laughed at in a professional kitchen. These shame-filled events and their associated knives were etched in my memory. I would walk on by if I saw them, keep scanning for the telltale handle of a chef knife, a box that could contain pocket knives, or a box of kitchen utensils that could have a stowaway knife in it. I could scan the primmest, most tastefully turned out booth in 10 seconds and the biggest heap of meth rubble that vomited itself out the back of a dirty white van in 20 seconds. I got good at finding things quickly and keeping a straight face, asking how much something was when I found something great. There were a few other guys who were also looking for knives; sometimes they had another specialty too, maybe old fishing gear or old pens or lighters. There were generalist buyers and specialists like me, the Johnny one notes. There were the watch guys (they were all guys), the camera people, the jewelry people who formed little conspiratorial-looking huddles with little bottles of acid and scales. The book people were usually very easy-going, and the people looking for art were often the most hostile, snotty, bump you and not say ‘excuse me’ types. The worst offender looked like a nelly Ichabod Crane and wore the least convincing toupee since Xavier Cugat. For the most part, some of the most polite were the knife guys; they would never start digging around in a box you were already sorting. Getting stabbed wasn’t a threat per se, but multiple hands in a box of knives is a bad idea. We would wait and even tell others if we passed up something somebody else might be into.

“I could scan the primmest, most tastefully turned out booth in 10 seconds and the biggest heap of meth rubble that vomited itself out the back of a dirty white van in 20 seconds.”

Typically, a trip to the market would lead up to a time late in the morning when I would start to get the feeling that it was time to go. Often, I was still looking around, maybe I hadn’t made a good buy in 30 minutes to an hour, or someone I hoped to see wasn’t there. Maybe another market was happening somewhere else that drew a lot of regular vendors away. Anyhow, at this ‘certain time’ I would be feeling a little desperate to make a score and would start looking at stuff I typically wouldn’t. Certain vendors who generally priced things too high or had the same shit on display for months and years, one side getting bleached from the sun, baking away Sunday after Sunday in a wood box under a heavily worn sheet of plexiglass, looking like the smell of a diaper pail. I would ask myself what the hell I was doing looking at that sunbleached shit and would make the walk up the hill home to drink coffee and take my kids to the playground. Other times, I would pick things up that I knew had little value just to pick something up. I did have one hard and fast metric for when it was time to go home, like a disciplined barfly who held themselves to certain standards, and that was when I intentionally picked up a Forgecraft or Old Hickory knife.

These knives are not really bad for inexpensive American-made carbon steel knives from the 1950s and ‘60s. They are instantly recognizable, with boxy hickory handles and a kind of rectangular waffle pattern with a black forge scale and a big, wide primary grind on the carbon steel blades. There were so many of them, and typically the condition was so-so (like airplane food that was awful and in such small portions). They never fetched much, but they were fine from a utilitarian standard, provided they weren’t too thick from being sharpened down 500 times. From my perspective, even if purchased cheaply, they just treaded water money-wise and were not worth the time. I had a contract with myself; if I picked one up, it was time to go home. It was usually about 9:30 by that time, and everything good was gone. More than just the association with the disappointment of getting a final bid of $12.48 on an ebay auction after having spent $10, I rejected them for the self-loathing of needy 9:30 am flea market choices. Self-consciously having an emotional need to be lucky and feeling like a ragpicker. Fuck that.

Around 2018, I began noticing people bringing re-handled Forgecraft chef knives to the shop for sharpening. I was a little dumbstruck; it struck me as more than a little weird. I think I also felt that all my efforts to introduce people to the great old culinary knives were in vain, as this trailer trash was being crowned. I vaguely remember acting the cranky old man, accusing people of ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ when finding them rehandling expensive materials in sharpening orders. Maybe I wasn’t being fair, I suspected but I also didn’t understand why go to so much trouble to re-handle and polish a Forgecraft.

That said, the overall footprint geometry of a brand new Forgecraft chef knife is not terrible aside from the thickness of the tip half. In designing chef knives, I default to essentially a more symmetrical-sided triangle of a footprint like the Forgecraft has. it’s actually a bit more wa-gyuto-like than a typical Western knife, and if one is determined / sophisticated enough, the wide primary bevels do allow for thinning. It’s still a little to thick to cut nicely, I think, but with a good thinning, the geometry isn’t bad. The .95% carbon steel is not hard to sharpen and can take a fairly fine edge. I don’t seem to remember them keeping an edge super well, times that I have experimented with them but I do remember being very happy with one for a short period of time that I got from Jivano on 18th street (where 18 Reasons is now) in 1993 or 94. I did have several that I used in my home kitchens before starting Bernal Cutlery, and after starting, I did use a Forgecraft chef knife early on, in about 2005 or 6, for a few weeks. Beyond being a worse sharpener than I realized back then, they are too thick and don’t seem to hold an edge really well.

“I had to ask myself in my orthodoxy, was I being like the old timers at the flea market who told me they didn’t have any knives but had some kitchen knives? Did resale value influence my assessment of the intrinsic value of these knives?”

So I started touching Forgecraft knives again, and maybe giving them a less judgmental view. I had to ask myself in my orthodoxy, was I being like the old timers at the flea market who told me they didn’t have any knives but had some kitchen knives? Did resale value influence my assessment of the intrinsic value of these knives? To be fair, I could start to see why people were excited by them, but also had a little bit of suspicion as the nearly identical ‘Old Hickory’ knives made by the Ontario knife company got no love, and I suspected there was a kind of internet trend going on with Forgecraft. Both seem to be a soft heat treatment of a fairly high carbon content non-stainless steel; 1095 (.95% carbon), with the forge scale waffle pattern face and big wide primary bevels and hickory handles.

In re-examining my attitudes about the Forgecraft chef knife (I still think they are a little ungraceful in their lack of taper and heavy tip), I have thought about changing tastes and young people getting into old stuff. The Forgecraft craze is over, I think, but I am happy to see younger people take a new interest in old culinary knives. While there will be other fads that come and go with it I think this interest has an immense durability as culinary knives are not going away, and they represent an item from history that we can directly relate to using. That said I will shit when people start collecting Ikea knives, I hope I live long enough to see it so then I can scoff.

Early this year, Mario Cortez at the SF Chronicle sent the shop an email asking if we could shine any light on the popularity of sheepsfoot knives with chefs at restaurants here in the Bay Area. This email was forwarded to me, and I was initially a little flummoxed. Was I missing some new trend? Honestly, I thought possibly the Clydesdale hoof-looking “Serbian chef knives” (not a ‘traditional’ Serbian chef knife, but first made by several Serbs recently) might have jumped from the social media world to actual professional kitchens. I doubted it, as they are too heavy for actual professional kitchen work (I’m sure there are some using these things in professional kitchens, and if that’s you and you are clutching your pearls in offence, a thousand pardons, but are you sure you want to use that thing?). For the uninitiated (those who haven’t wasted time on social media in the last five years), they can be seen there being used to dispatch suspiciously limp fish snatched from pristine mountain creek waters conveniently next to a blazing campfire, where they chop and slice with gusto.

Luckily, I didn’t embarrass myself by asking if this was the knife in question and shut up, listening for another 2 minutes (not always my go-to) and found out Mario was referring to table knives with a sheepsfoot blade made in France that are in use at several restaurants here in San Francisco. After more discussion, I realized that these were made by Roland Lannier, a knife maker in Thiers, France, who used to be the production manager at Percival, and is now running his own shop and specializing in sheepsfoot-bladed table and folding knives. A significant benefit of a sheepsfoot-shaped blade that Lannier points out is that when used as a table/steak knife, it dulls slowly in that the point hits the plate more than any other spot, sacrificing itself for the rest of the edge, which stays lively longer.

Roland is absolutely correct, but definitely not the first to recognize and utilize this blade shape; in fact, some of the earliest European iron utility knives had this exact blade shape. It’s tempting to infantilize blacksmiths of old and explain that the sheepsfoot is an easy shape to forge and easy to fit into a simple friction-folding knife format, but I think the dynamic of the blade was recognized long ago and has remained a popular choice of blade shape in folding knives.

Depending on the type of blade being made, sheep’s blades can have several different personalities.

Depending on the type of blade being made, sheep’s blades can have several different personalities, lending to different types of use. On a small light blade, such as the paring knives especially popular in northern Europe, a flat edge with a pointed tip is great for peeling and cutting veggies. Whereas in English this type of knife is referred to as a ‘paring knife’, intimating its use in Germany, it is called a “gemüsemesser” - a “vegetable knife” - as it is used for a wide variety of tasks involving vegetables. There is a story that I heard in Solingen as an explanation of the origin of the birds beak paring knife (a sheepsfoot with inward curving beak-shaped blade); in the 19th century, carbon steel sheepsfoot paring knives - gemüsemesser would be used in hand by women in the country at green bean harvest to cut handfuls of beans. As the knives cut hundreds of beans (and not hitting a cutting board), they would become worn in the center and would grip the beans more effectively. These women would bring their worn knives to knife makers in Solingen and request that their gemüsemesser be sharpened in this way, giving rise to the bird’s beak from the sheepsfoot gemüsemesser. I don’t know if this parallels the origin of the bird’s beak in other places, the French are known to be maniacal in haute cuisine kitchens with these traumatizing young cooks with endless hours of seven-sided potatoes cut with a bird’s beak, or tournée knife; named after its use, ‘turning’.

My shame at not immediately referencing the table knife applications of the sheepsfoot is compounded by the fact that I had recently found an amazingly elegant set of small hand forged and very finely ground sheepsfoot table knives marked “Marnet” with intricate, perfectly set ferrules and ebony handles that scream very early 19th century “Empire period” France. Also in the same collection is a somewhat mysterious large sheepsfooted knife with a knurled horn handle and an etching of a hunting scene on its massive blade. Unmarked, possibly from the early 18th century or very early 19th century, guessing from the clothes of the hunters, and possibly from Italy, Germany, or France. Definitely a part of a very fine set of knives for the butchering, carving, and serving of the game hunted in the swells’ hunting parties. Hunting in Europe was not a common activity, unlike in the United States, and the apportionments of hunting and game were very lavish, undoubtedly part of a display of wealth and social status.

Similar-shaped knives of varying sizes can be seen in use in the amazing 1581 Italian treatise on carving ‘Il trinciante’ by Vicenzo Cervio, a master carver and officer in the household of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Cervio’s style of carving was done with the meat of choice (from tiny quail on up to large joints) held up on a fork and elegantly sliced in the air (I would like to say ‘think baroque Benihana’, but this is the Renaissance). The role of such a carver was not limited to the skillful slicing of meat but to entertain and provide a very important hospitality function at a potentially tense moment in a meal, such as determining who is getting more or who is getting served first.

Back to my two sheepsfoot knives:

These two examples bookend the different benefits and strengths of the sheepsfoot. Our Marnet table knives can delicately and precisely cut all sorts of food on the plate, especially meats, with only the tip in contact with the plate; its edge is protected and ready for work with a minimum of effort. On the other hand our ‘big faka’ has a long capable blade, and even with a nice taper in it’s thickness and a swedge grind on the spine behind the tip edge theres a good amount of weight at the tip giving a short swing a lot of power, perfect for getting through the tough sinew and tendons of active game animals as well as finishing the cuts at joints.

These two capacities, precision and punch, varying on the size of the sheepsfoot in play, have also had long-standing places in the knives of the Netherlands, where the ‘boscher’ knife has been an iconic Dutch knife. Narrower at the waist where the blade begins at the handle,e flaring out in width towards the very accentuated sheepsfoot tip, they have alternately been personal carry utility knives (before one would be assured a knife to borrow when eating away from home) or utility knives ranging from intricately carved boxwood handled knives to simple agricultural tools for harvesting. Knives in this pattern formed a large amount of exports from Solingen to the nearby Netherlands in the 19th and early 20th century, the hand forged, hand ground blades simply but neatly fitted to an oval profiled handle. Using a boscher is a departure from a chef knife, which thrives on the forward rocking push cut. Due to the boscher’s flaring tip, a push cut does not engage the edge the same as a pull cut, which, due to the widening blade, provides bite, and the wide tip helps to steer the blade straight through the cut. While I have not harvested any veggies with one for bread, it is very competent, and with cooked or uncooked meat has a very direct, authoritative slicing motion. The name ‘boscher’ is unclear to me. I suspect it might have roots in the French ‘bocher’ or butcher knife; the family name Boscher is also an occupational name for one who sells wood or manages a forest, but I miss the connection to this knife and wood… Anyhow, this sheepsfoot has a very different and strong accent of its own, but is a great example of the pull cut potential of the sheepsfoot, a somewhat overlooked feature of many knives common to us here in the US, outside of narrow carving or fillet slicers.

Arguably, the most important and stealthy sheepsfoot is the mother of today’s classic bread knife, the Hamburg knife, which has a kind of double hump backed sheepsfoot shape. If the boscher is the dromedary of the sheepsfoot, this is the double humped bactrian. Local to the northern Hamburg region this bread knife was designed with a backwards-facing handle to facilitate cutting bread held under the arm (without a cutting board) in the fields at lunchtime. In Germany, bread knives became thicker as one headed north, the southern wheat growing zone giving way to the northern rye-lands and their more stodgier rye breads. The Hamburg shape somehow became the dominant style in the 19th century (more money for buying bread knives up north then??), but remained a short, non-serrated knife with the backwards curving handle. This design was curiously taken up, it seems, by the English in the mid-19th century as well, with numerous Sheffield-made knives done with a 5 to 7-inch blade and a carved wheat ear handle, often saying ‘Bread’. How it jumped to Britain, I do not know, but knife makers are keen to have a new knife to sell. Victorians needed no encouragement to add utensils, and als,o knife makers are a promiscuous lot and do not adhere to cultural purity in knife design. Especially in the era of the printed catalog of the 19th-century industrial knife design, espionage was sped up rapidly as domestic and export markets became more up for grabs.

The stealthy part of the Hamburg knife is in how its double-humped sheepsfoot blade morphed into today’s ubiquitous bread knife shape. Look at a traditional Hamburg-style bread knife alone, and it just looks a little weird with its sow belly camel back action, but put next to a typical bread knife today, and it definitely reads as a progenitor. In a way, it would make sense that Germany’s main impact on culinary knife design is through the bread knife, as Germany holds the greatest density of bread varieties in the world today.

Aside from being reminded about the charms and arguments for the sheepsfoot blade, this little adventure with the sheepsfoot has reminded me of the phenomenon of knife users rediscovering the value of certain traditional designs. In this case, restaurateurs are rediscovering the value of the sheepsfoot blade for use at the table, where dull steak knives are a persistent issue. For them, discovering Roland’s sheepsfoot table knives must have felt like a revelation, even though it’s a solution discovered long, long ago. So it is with culinary knife design in constant rediscovery, it seems, and so it also seems I am being driven to end with a platitude here. Maybe you will fill in your favorite in the spirit of rediscovery.

Recently I got a text from an old customer who had a box of knives he had purchased from Bernal starting around 2013 that he was looking to sell. Matt would sometimes help me finish raising rent for the month when he would periodically buy a big batch of knives which he would re-handle and sell himself. He would make new handles for Japanese and Western-handled knives and would sell them through us and a few other shops. He liked 270mm gyutos and I would keep him in mind when adding a few of these behemoths to my orders. Not many other people used a 270mm (11”) gyuto at work, but they were his jam. Matt had drifted away from doing the re-handling and was thinning down his knife collection and so he brought up some knives from LA that had been sitting in his collection. Konosuke Sakai (from Bernal and a few other vendors) and Yoshikane from Bernal. It's honestly really wild looking at these old knives, some with labels from our old shops, old handwriting from myself and our crew.

On my last visit to Japan in the summer of 2023 I learned why people told me not to go in late summer, the intense unrelenting humidity and heat was no joke. I thought heat stroke was for stubborn octogenarians who insisted on golfing midday in the Arizona summer but learned that you can also get it in August in Japan by just huffing and puffing 6 blocks from train station to hotel with bags and backpacks. Among many other memorable heat stroke near misses from that trip was a visit to Kazuomi Yamamoto at Yoshikane Hamono to catch up. It had been four years since I had seen him, and a lot had happened in that time. At the beginning of our conversation (translated, as my Japanese is useless), I tried to ask in a casual and offhand manner if he would consider making the western-handled knives again (last ones we got were in 2017 or so. A lot of people really loved them and had been asking if he would ever make them again. Without any translation, he smiled, got a sly look in his eye like he caught me and shook his head saying “I think I know what you are saying, and those are bad words”. I laughed and told him I thought he would say something like that.

The first knives I imported directly from Japan in 2011 were Ashi and Yoshikane. I didn’t have a big budget and agonized over what to order. Every time I thought I put together a good order, I went over budget. It was hard to whittle them down and to know what quantity to order of different knife sizes. Finally, I got the orders in and then waited for them. These still were made to order but in 2010/2011, there were far fewer shops outside of Japan selling them, and the recession had softened demand. Maybe I waited three or four months. It seemed like an eternity every time I checked my email for updates, I wish I could only wait that long now. I think Ashi was the first to show up, and the bandaid-colored ‘gum tape’ sealing the box was super exciting to cut open. I had sharpened a few Ashi and Yoshikane before in my then five or six-year-old sharpening service and was amazed at how easy they were to sharpen compared to the more standard-fare Japanese knives that tended to come my way.

It took a while for people to take to the Ashi and Yoshikane knives. Just a little too expensive for most home cooks and they did not have the brand recognition of other Japanese brands for most professionals. Finally, some cooks took my word for it and started using them here in San Francisco and before too long their co-workers showed up to get one too. Now we cannot stay stocked, and backorders stretch out over the years. They also seem ridiculously underpriced at what they used to sell for, even when adjusted for inflation and all.

A year or so after first bringing in Ashi and Yoshikane I was able to start ordering knives from Konosuke in Sakai. I was able to put together an order with the help of a new employee, helping me with sharpening, Tagg, who collected a group of his sushi chef friends. Tagg had a background in sushi and is still working behind the sushi bar here in S.F. at Chisai on Mission St in Bernal. We got together enough knives for the minimum order, and I added some for the shop. But first, I had to agonize over what exactly to order and how to keep my budget in check. Again, somehow I made it and put our order in and waited a little while for the knives to get finished and arrive.

Konosuke was a great introduction to really fine Sakai hand forged, hand ground knife making. Konosuke is loved for both the consistently excellent quality of the forging they have done for them in Sakai and also for the finesse of the grinding and sharpening work on their knives. Kosuke Kawamura started Konosuke as an extension of his father’s cutlery business Kawamura Hamono (there are a few Kawamure Hamono’s in Sakai by the way) and working with Morihiro Hamono for grinding and sharpening, was instrumental in bringing old-style Sakai single bevel grinding techniques to double bevel knives. What looks like centuries-old traditional knifemaking in Konosuke’s early Fujiyama wide double-bevel knives is a fairly modern innovation with a lot of creativity behind it. Clean, beautiful work, and honestly, everything about their packaging and presentation was great. My hands felt dirty immediately after opening a box from Konosuke.

I could keep going on about each new revelation with the next set of vendors I started working with at this phase of Bernal Cutlery; Sakai Kikumori and K Sabatier being a few others that next exposed me to new stuff, and broadened our horizons but I want to get back to Yoshikane. Somehow being reunited with a few of those old stock Western handled Yoshikane that have long been out of production got me thinking about old conversations I had had with Kazuomi Yamamoto that had I had had a chance to understand and re-understand as my experience of running a business and developing a craft with other people grew.

When I was researching writing Sharp back in 2016 and was interviewing Yamamoto-san at Yoshikane Hamono, I asked something to the effect of what is the most important thing you have learned as a knife-maker, essentially what was the family’s secret sauce that he could distill for me. I was expecting something about forging temperature and duration, heat treatment combinations, or a golden ratio for grinding geometry. Instead, he gave me the two following Japanese kotozawa; shorthand proverbs: “Sessa takuma” and “Shoshin wasuru bekarazu”. When I researched them and understood their meaning, they made sense. The selection of these kotozawa pointed to an attitude of how to approach learning and growing within a craft rather than acquiring specific knowledge. Shoshin wasuru bekarazu is about remembering the beginner's mind frame or remembering one’s original intent. Sessa takuma is made up of four characters that translate directly to “cut, shine, rock, grind” and is sometimes interpreted as rocks polishing each other in a river.

Shortly after the time I spoke with Yamamoto-san I learned Sessa takuma (after gathering a few interpretations) can be seen as personal refinement working collaboratively or in competition with others. I had read about it at work in Buddhist monasteries in the personal development resulting from the way monks would irritate each other. As rocks tumble in a stream their rough edges are worn down by each other. Having a growing crew over the years has brought us into contact with this phenomenon for sure. Not that we all irritate each other constantly, but anyone who works a busy service industry job knows how personality traits in oneself and co-workers can be either assets or liabilities. Sometimes both depending on the situation. I have learned a good deal about myself in working with others; when to let go of things that I feel possessive of and hand them over, when to hand something to someone who is more skilled than me and how to be clear and not afraid to ask for what I want. Most targets at the shop are moving targets often changing with time, so not getting ossified in a set attitude is important. At the same time other things we bump into often don’t seem to change and going with what we have learned makes for not re-inventing the wheel constantly. Some knives wax and wane in popularity and how people integrate them into their work or home cooking is temporary (looking at you single bevel kiritsuke circa 2012-15) and others are immovable and don’t seem to change; 8” chef and 210mm gyuto. Some attitudes people come into the shop with are not going to be changed, and sometimes we learn from them; for example, the choice of knives for breaking fish or approaches to in-hand paring knives.

Shoshin wasuru bekarazu is about remembering the beginner's mind frame or remembering one’s original intent. I have mostly internalized this in keeping at hand what my process of learning looked like. When I was a kid trying to sharpen my pocket knives in the 1970s in my room in Echo Park, Los Angeles. I had a few pocket knives I would use to carve wood, make spears for hunting lemons out of a semi-neglected tree in my overgrown backyard, doing little carving things, and a million other things you do with a pocket knife when you’re 7 or 8 years old. I had three favorites, a Buck 112 lockback, an Imperial brand Barlow jack knife, and a carbon steel Opinel #8. The Buck knife had a little Arkansas stone that came with it or was bought separately but I remember the little plastic box it came in with a gold Buck logo and a stinky little bottle of oil. My knives were abused and very dull, I tried to use that little 1x3” stone to sharpen them with the sharp smelling oil and not really getting anywhere with the bruised and rounded edge on the Buck knife, sometimes cutting my fingers. When I did get enough of an edge to do so, I had better luck on the Opinel, its thin carbon steel blade was a lot more obliging to the sharpening stone and would quickly get sharp again. Magic.

Shoshin wasuru bekarazu also brings me to my early 20s a little bit after I moved to San Francisco in the early 90s getting my first Japanese whetstone and going after the knives I shared with 5 other roommates in my apartment on 18th and Guerrero. I bought a stone and inexpensive rustic style forged Japanese knife at Soko Hardware in Japantown. I had no idea what I was doing but some knives did seem to get sharper, others were impervious to my efforts but I did get a fleeting taste of competency. Maybe not enough to keep at it diligently and develop my skills for several years as I apparently found other distractions.

The wish to be able to have advised my younger self gives me the enjoyment I find in teaching people now how to get started sharpening, its a long road and I only really only point their feet in the right direction and maybe teach them how to tie their shoes for the journey but I do remember how I really wanted to get those stones to make music with my knives and instead got some a few skronky honks and beeps.

For the last several years I have been teaching myself how to use a large Japanese grinding wheel; a kaiten mizu toishi. It has been a direct engagement in Shoshin wasuru bekarazu as I am relatively new to using it compared with the rest of the sharpening work I do. Not saying I am really good at everything whetstone, I don’t particularly like to work many, many hours on one knife making a ‘flawless’ finish, but I’m not bad at keeping an even angle and have good experience picking appropriate finishes, knives I sharpen perform well I think. Theres certainly still trial and error working out different finishes on knives I regularly use and knives I am in the process of testing out; our own BC prototypes and also knives that we source for the shop.

While I got to first watch and then later to actually use the kaiten mizu toishi grinder myself with Ashi-san in Sakai on numerous visits sharpening both Ashi hamaguri and single bevel grinds I was not good when I first took up the wheel. Lumpy surfaces, and irregular thinness along the edge, I was a little afraid of it pulling the knife out of my hands and throwing it across the room. It was actually easier than I thought, it skated over the surface with a little tug letting me know it was removing steel, a spray of water with sparks in it trailing behind away from me. After having one myself to use years later I’m still not perfect, but I can now let my hands do the thinking while I’m working for good periods of time before having to check in with the work and look for flaws. I can feel the thickness and shape of the blade between my hands or the grinding board and the stone wheel most of the time. Restoring old Western knives over the foundational geometry laid down many many decades ago also has given me insight into the older approaches of hand grinders. By giving myself permission to be bad at something again I got a chance to grow as a sharpener.

In an even larger sense, this 20-year mark finds us in the middle of a significant (for us) expansion, following the trajectory and momentum gathered on projects started years ago; wholesale distribution and manufacturing, more opportunities to again experience being in the green fruit stage of Shoshin wasuru bekarazu. Having 20 years of experience in a craft and a business, and again returning to that green learning phase is a different experience, and I’m finding a new benefit of Shoshin wasuru bekarazu; being able to temper both fear and overconfidence, which is always welcome. I find the benefits not from getting it perfect but from getting on with it no matter what.

At 5 years old, my first job was helping my Grandma Gallagher out on Sunday morning. First, I cleaned “dust bunnies” around the hardwood floor corners, and then, after that, my next and most exciting task was cutting the morning vegetables for her Sunday soup. She paid me $2 for this work, which I greatly adored. Grandma Jane, a mother of eight, took a lot of pride in her Sunday soup, and I remember her telling me that the soup was how she would get her adult kids to come back home for a meal. This is where I learned my most basic knife skill set and how my love of paring knives must have started. I learned how to cut a large amount of vegetable ingredients for a huge stock pot amount of soup that would feed at least 12 people and include some to take home in a recycled food container, I mostly remember a lot of “I can’t believe it’s not butter” and cottage cheese containers. Half of her eight kids were out of the house but would come by for a hot meal and maybe bring a few people with them. It was a kitchen event, and I was part of it at such a young age. I remember how proud I felt about that job. I learned not only how to cut on a board but also how to cut over a bowl or pot in my hands like she did.

Today, my knife skills resemble my dyslexic handwriting, where you will see my final product folded, stacked, and pulled together when I have time and want to focus, or if someone is watching; quick, snappy and semi-legible with hidden misspellings in the cursive but sturdy with gumption and utility; and as I have aged as a mom of three cooking for a bigger family I have added thrifty incredibly utilitarian, serviceable and flavorful to my knife skills. I cut both in hand and on a board, and sometimes I cut with kitchen scissors.

Hand cutting as a knife skill is usually seen in French or French-inspired professional kitchens for careful peeling using a bird’s beak (Tournét) or the old guard folk in home-kitchens, such as grandmothers and great Aunties. Over the years, I have found myself wanting to keep this particular knife skill alive and pay it homage as much as I can, especially when cooking soup. It has also led to my insane collection of tiny knives. I must have a couple dozen tiny knives in my kitchen, and even more, are still in my tucked-away collection. I know it might seem like I have a problem collecting these knives on the outside, but I genuinely find so much joy in each one of them, and you can, too.

Although small knives do great careful work on boards, learning to process your home produce using hand-cutting knife skills can serve as meditation and demand one to slow down and carefully consider what you are cutting. I notice that my carrots, potatoes, and cucumbers look beautiful, but I’ve also wasted a lot less than I would have with a larger knife. It’s also a skill that can carry over to a large knife. I have the ability to hand-cut produce with a large knife, although it is not really recommended unless you are strictly interested in showing off.

In one box of old knives years ago, I found a 2.75-inch French paring knife. This was the most lovely, elegant old vintage knife with the best hand-cutting feel, and although it had a life and was mid-life, there was still more life to be had in the blade. The wood handle was very old, splintered, and maybe not the most hygienic. To give some color here, Josh would try to throw the knife away as he would say it was time to retire it”. I coveted this knife. Fun Fact: Eventually, Josh found a Thiers, France maker still making these knives, and we source them for our retail store under Au Sabot. So now I have the new version and the 80-year-old version. They are super thin, well-ground paring knives with a sleek taper in the handle. They are great for peeling hand-cut cucumbers over a salad bowl or for general utility. I also love the thin grinds and handle of the F. Herder x Bernal Cutlery paring knife. Soon, F. Herder will be marking the milestone of 300 years in operation. These knives are like living history.

Paring comes from the Latin word pare, meaning to take away or peel. Although my collection has knives 6 inches and smaller, the proper pairing knives generally refer to small, narrow-shaped knives that are 4 inches and smaller.

Over time, paring knives have come to us from a mashup of knives intended for general utility, eating, small butchery, as well as the obvious trimming and peeling knives for food preparation. The ‘office’ knife, a 5 or 6-inch stiff narrow utility knife used to butcher small game in the “office” room where game and produce entered a manor’s kitchen, is a main ingredient in the stiffer forged paring knives, but in the woodpile, we will find older personal knives carried for both utility and eating (the great great great grandparents of our table knives) and much smaller thinner vegetable peeling knives which peelers have generally replaced. Today, you find three main blade shapes: spear point, sheep's foot, and tournet (bird’s beak), a cousin of the traditional hook-shaped bladed pocket folders as well.

So, my plea to you, dear reader, is to find yourself a small tiny workhorse that fits in your hand perfectly. Get a collection of tiny knives going, new, old carbon stainless and ranging from 2.5 to 6”, and keep them handy and give them love, and they will love you back.

I recently pulled the 12" chef knife off one of the knife magnets in my kitchen, which doesn't often happen. Sure, if there was an extra large winter squash to cleave or a freak orgy of sauerkraut-making, then yes, but day to day, it's generally getting ignored. Having a 12" chef knife at home is weird, and having one in a professional knife roll is also weird. Most people don't have a 10" chef knife at home, much less a 12", and these days, many professionals might not have chef knives larger than 8.5".

That day, I grabbed the 12" chef knife and cut a loaf of bread. It sailed through straight and strong; it didn't whine about the bottom crust or need reassurance. It went straight through, and I was hungry for more. I decided right there I was going to make this my regular knife for all knife-related jobs for a week, 'give it a bit of bollocks' would be my mantra. I used it on everything including but not limited to more loaves of bread, garlic, onions, broccoli, a steak, splitting English muffins, peeling cucumbers, cutting sandwiches, zucchini, ginger, cheese, fine-slicing green onions and cutting a pizza. The work was always done before I felt like I was done; it was great to use something with its power. Admittedly, some things were a little silly, and I could have used a better knife (minced garlic), but it was possible, and I stuck to my weird pledge.

My 12" chef knife is a French 'Ideal' pattern with a hand-forged carbon steel blade, and the archetypal black POM (plastic) handles made possibly from the 1960s to early 90s. This combination of carbon steel and POM composite is kind of an Ur-Sabatier, exactly the type Julia Childs famously 'chop-chopped' with, and is still in production; we get them in carbon and POM with brass rivets from the venerable K Sabatier in Thiers. 

My grandfather had a gold Buick Mercury in the 1970s that had big wide bench seats (also gold) and a distinct smell that was equal parts gasoline, Pinot Clubman aftershave, cigarettes, and denture-friendly Freedent mint gum. When you went over 40 miles an hour in that car, it bounced a little bit on its suspension; going on the freeway, it settled into a confident nod of approval and had the feel that it propelled itself. That is what using this knife felt like. Minus the signature Chester Bernard Donald smell or much gold.

12" chef knives used to be a much more common part of a professional's tool kit. Origin-wise, they span a range of different locals. French, German, and American make are the most commonly found by me vintage knife-wise. The 12" chef knife is the knife of one in charge, either of their station or of the kitchen; it puts the chief in chef. For many volume-oriented tasks, it screams past smaller knives in its ability to blast through a large stack of something vegetal or slice thin something big and animal. It was certainly not the only knife used, but it was part of the armory. 

When I got started sharpening professionally 20 years ago, the 10" chef knife was the de rigueur professional chef knife, it seemed most students in culinary school were given one and professional knife rolls that came across my sharpening counter had a 10" chef knife or a similarly sized Japanese knife (240mm or 270mm). Sometimes, this 10" chef clearly had lots of miles on its odometer and should have been retired but still had a space in the roll in a place of pride as the venerated elder. When older cooks would come in for a chef knife, it was almost a given to start showing them 10" and many asked for 12" as well. The vintage and antique 13 and 14" knives I scored would almost always go to one of these grizzled old-timers. I suspected lines from Dirty Harry ran through their heads too. 

These days, it is much safer to assume that professionals are looking for a shorter knife when asking for a chef knife 10" is not the de facto choice. Work for many fine dining cooks has changed over the years, and training has changed as well; larger knives are not the starting point, and for many, they have not picked up much. I don't want to assume that I know anyone's job or trade better than they do, and demands on knife skills have changed. I know; however, when one never gets used to a large knife, it is harder to make a case for picking one up and getting to work with it. My experience as a home cook is that after a few sessions, a larger knife starts to feel more comfortable, and the size of a bigger chef knife becomes an asset in most applications rather than a liability. 

Ultimately, there is no other way to describe it than to experience it oneself, and because I feel so strongly about how useful this knife is and how great it feels to cut with we make sure to stock them whenever they are available despite them not being on the best sellers list (yet) 

I was a Girl Scout for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and when I asked my mom, she swore it was the Brownies, not the Girl Scouts. I remember feeling way too dusty and tomboyish for the particular troop in my neighborhood but it was probably because the troop leader, Ursula, who was an adult bully who fixated on me and my mom. She made it uncomfortable for me to stick around. Today, in my knifey world and travels, I have found myself with a small curio-style collection of Girl Scout knives. It is a magpie collection that I put together while contemplating the idea of a knife for girls. The collection has happened steadily over a decade, more as a fascination rather than an obsession. Through this collection, I’ve been trying to distill a story about girls and knives. Some of the knives are good finds and pinpoint periods of American history worth noting and also made by really great American knife companies, Ulster, Remington, Marbles, Utica-Kutmaster and more. Still, the collection is a curiosity collection, all kept in a Robert Burns edition cigar box. 

The first one I came across was in a grip of vintage pocket knives from one of Josh's Alemany Flea Market hauls. It was a classic official Girl Scout knife, post-war Utica Kutmaster’s 1950’s green multi-blade with a saddle-back can opener, super common. It stood out in the box of old pocket knives, almost like a gemstone with its green translucent scales. Was it 2016, or was it 2018?. Having young children at the time, I taught knife skills to kids, and I observed parents’ attitudes and fears about kids with knives spanned the map. On one end of the spectrum, there were Waldorf or Waldorf adjacent parents or teachers who would bring their kids or classes of kids into the shop as young as 4 and 5 to get whittling knives or advice on teaching young kids knife skills for cooking. And, then, of course, on the other end of the spectrum the parents who had such deep fear of knives but knew on some level that they needed to give their kids a class and everyone else in between. But what stood out in my experiences, in particular, was how gendered knives and kids were. Knives as tools were always bent towards boys, even today.

In any case, what came to me directly with these thoughts was a quiet realization that for me knives were always a way for me to protect myself. Most girls I knew had some sort of self-defense protection, whether it was pepper spray, keys held a certain way,  a pocket knife, or in my case, when I was in my 20’s for example, a boot knife and a Benchmade pocket knife in my back pocket. I would walk home at night from the Lexington bar to my house on Sycamore St. with my knife open where the blade would line up outward on my arm under my sleeve so if anyone grabbed my wrist they would cut themselves. When I was a kid, I remember people trying to break into the house my mom and I lived in and grabbing a kitchen knife to protect us. It’s a primal reflex and just a social reality for girls and women. 

In contrast, the Girl Scout knives in my collection represent a world where there are knives made for girls as gear.  After sitting with this collection for all these years, this is what continues to bubble up to me and what strikes me: a world where girls build things and contribute to their communities. The GSA also covers self-defense with and achievable badge and troop leaders are also incentivized. It sounds like a magical, idealistic place. In the years since I was a kid attending that first troop meeting, I’ll be honest; I never thought much about the Girls Scouts as an organization.

Researching the knives brought alive a history I’m ashamed I knew nothing about. Just as we all carry a little misogyny in our pockets, I must admit, I always rolled my eyes at the GSA. Maybe some of my bias was learned from troop leader Ursula Hutchinson or others like her that popped up from time to time.

My life experience tells me so. Sometimes, the worst enemies to me in my life were those of women carrying misogyny in their pockets.  It doesn’t escape me that I was born to a bright and talented teen mother in 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade. My mother tried doing all the right things as a teen mother; she married my dad, and when that didn’t work, she left my dad. We moved into a small apartment across from my new school where I would start the 1st grade. I remember feeling so much pride in my mother for doing this. She applied to one of the top colleges in Pittsburgh, got in, and started classes. This must have intimidated Ursula, and looking back, I think my mom and I both endured quite a bit of social disapproval from others. Ursula was the mom of my classmate Robby, and she was also in the PTA and a lunch mother. She was around my school life quite a bit. It seemed like she was in every corner. She tore my mom’s character down in front of me at school and made my life generally difficult. Uresala learned to tear down women just like most women learn to do so, whether explicitly or through subtle bias. So, by the time I made it to my first GSA troop meeting, I saw Urslela there. It tainted my view of the GSA by association, which led to me being a little snobby or disregarding through the years, missing out on what GSA could have meant for me as a girl and appreciating it as an adult. But if I’m honest, I see a little bit of Ursala in myself, and after all these years, I wish her well and hope she found some peace in her life. Ultimately, what is done to women to make them ugly characters in chapters of their lives and having moments to life-times of terrible moral compasses is nothing but a causality of a world that most often mistreats women.

What I missed out on regarding the history of the GSA was huge. And I also know now that I  would have significantly benefited from a GSA membership growing up. I regret not sticking it out. The historical significance of the GSA must be considered. It’s been truly humbling to learn the magnitude of the GSA. Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, started her first troop in Georgia with 18 members in 1912, and by the following year, they already needed a national headquarters; by 1920, the same year, women won the right to cast their votes, membership of GSA was well over 70,000 girls. To put this in perspective, it took almost 80 years for women to gain the right to vote. As an organization, the GSA was at the ready and inspired by a multi-generational and hard-won movement to educate girls and prepare them for citizenship.

The original handbook was titled What Girls Can Do For Their Country and the first iteration of their mission statement was to help girls “...grow into happy, useful women and good citizens through democratic participation in a variety of group activities, including community service, creative arts and outdoor recreation.” 

It’s perfect to know that the suffrage movement gave us the Girls Scouts. When taking in the breadth of its impact on the needs and desires of young girls and women, it was like a love letter from women to their collective future selves through girls. Quietly but profoundly, the GSA has been meeting the moment for women and girls for over 100 years.

What can girls do for their country? Over the past 100 years since the GSA was founded and women achieved the right to vote after 80 years of trying, women have shattered glass ceilings and reshaped the economic landscape. They've gone from primarily homemakers to holding positions of power in politics, business, and science while still occupying the silent labor market of caretaking the aging populations and child-rearing. This shift has profoundly impacted the U.S. economy, with women's participation in the labor force adding trillions of dollars to the GDP.

Their contributions aren't just economic; women have led movements for social justice, spearheaded groundbreaking research, and created impactful art that has transformed our culture. From the voting booth to the boardroom, women have become undeniable forces of progress, driving innovation and inspiring generations by being way ahead of the times. According to GSA’s “Facts and Figures” over 50 million girls and women are members of the GSA, proving the value of the true American treasure to women and society that it is. What have girls not done for their country in the last 100 years?

My Curio Collection of Girls Scouts Knives

Intentionally described as a personal curiosity collection, I don’t want it to be confused with a serious pocket knife collection. Still, hopefully, it inspires someone to make an earnest Girls Scouts Knife collection and take the mantle and do it justice. The trajectory of the official knife of the GSA is a sampling of some of the best American manufacturers of knives. The American pocket knife industry has a rich history, with companies like Utica, Marbles, Remington, and Ulster playing significant roles. Utica Cutlery, founded in 1910, was known for its affordable and durable knives, particularly those supplied to the military during World War II. Established in 1898, Marbles also gained fame for its outdoor and hunting knives, often featuring distinctive designs and materials like stacked leather handles. In early America, hunting was not just for the upper classes of society like it was in Europe, and by the late 19th century, the need for a new style of field knife for hunting was addressed. Marbles served that need well and became iconic to American-made knives. While primarily known for firearms, Remington also produced a range of pocket knives from the late 19th century onwards, often emphasizing practicality and affordability. Ulster Knife Company, founded in 1923, specialized in producing high-quality pocket knives, focusing on craftsmanship and innovative designs, catering to a more discerning market. These companies and others helped establish the American pocket knife as both a utilitarian tool and a collectible item, reflecting the country's changing needs and values over time. 

Here’s what in my collection and up for sale on our website. All proceeds will be matched by me and donated to the National Women’s Law Center while hoping that women are on the minds of voters. If you buy the entire collection, I’ll throw in the cool cigar box.

Marble’s Fixed Blade ( the Depression Era GSA ) Click here to Buy

A very hard-to-find scarce Marbles Sport pattern knife made for the Girl Scouts between 1930 and 1935 in Gladstone, Michigan, with a 4" carbon steel blade with the Girl Scouts shield hot stamped in the face of the blade, brass guard, vulcanized rubber and brass spacers on a stacked leather handle and an aluminum buttcap. With original sheath marked Girl Scouts on the face and Marble's Gladstone Mich. on snap. 

This knife has been used but never abused, the blade hasn't been sharpened in much at all and is very full. It has seen light rust causing shallow pits and pepperpots, but nothing is disfiguring. The handle leather is healthy and has not dried or rotted, the pommel has a little play as the leather has shrunk a bit, it is possible to tighten the brass washer. The sheath is very healthy, the keeper snap is free from cracks or drying, and some stitching has come loose on the sheath, but otherwise, it in great shape for being 90 years old. 

Marbles was the maker that first designed the stacked leather-handled knife, pioneered the creation of knives specifically for outdoor use, and created a distinctly American outdoor knife. For a knife made in the thick of the depression, it is very, very well made. All materials and workmanship were top-notch from Marble's. They set the standard for outdoor knives at the time, with lots of imitators. It's very cool to see it offered to Girl Scouts. 

During the Great Depression, Girl Scouts stepped up to support their communities. Membership increased in the 1930s. With First Lady Lou Hoover as National President, they focused on service, collecting food and clothing, and helping in hospitals. Girl Scouts learned valuable skills like sewing and cooking and adapted their cookie sales by working with bakers, which helped make cookies more available and thus began the cookie campaign we all know so well.

—--

Dwight Devine Ulster 4 blade (suffrage era GSA1920?) Click here to buy

This is a near-mint example of the first model Girl Scout knife made by the Dwight Devine Ulster company in Ellenville, NY, from 1918 to 1941. It has carbon steel blades, jigged bone hafts, brass liners, nickel bolsters, a GSA shield, and a bail. 

This knife still has the lightly etched Girl Scouts etch on the main blade, which has a slightly dulled factory edge. All other blades are with their original bright finish (NOT buffed). These are carbon steel, not stainless. The knife is in the original green cardboard box with a leather inset and the original foil label on the top of the box.

This is such a great find here, not only for a knife of its period in such good condition, which was during the heyday of American knife making, but also as the very first Girl Scout knife that was offered to the brand new Girl Scouts. Really Special. 

The Girl Scouts of America, founded in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low in Georgia, emerged during significant social and political change in the United States, including the burgeoning women's suffrage and labor movements. While the organization maintained a neutral stance on suffrage to avoid alienating members, its focus on empowering girls and fostering civic engagement indirectly supported the movement's goals. Girl Scouts participated in community service, learned about citizenship, and developed leadership skills, activities that prepared them to be active and engaged citizens once they gained the right to vote. Some individual Girl Scout leaders, like Edith Carpenter Macy and Sarah Birdsall Otis Edey, were actively involved in the suffrage movement, demonstrating the connection between the two causes. Following the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Girl Scouts even assisted at polling stations, caring for children so that women could exercise their newly won right to vote. Although Women of color didn't realize their right to vote the first all-Black Girl Scout troops were established as early as 1917. In 1924, three decades before U.S. public schools were desegregated, Josephine Holloway became the first Black Girl Scout troop leader. She opened the door for young Black girls to see their own Black Girl Magic as part of Girl Scouts. (from the GSA Black History Blog)

—--

Utica Featherweight Bone 2-blade (post WWII GSA)

This is a pair of two examples of the post-war Utica Featherweight 2-blade GSA knives from 1948 to 1956. They have carbon steel blades, jigged bone hafts, aluminum liners, bolsters, and a GSA shield with a steel bail. 

One of these has a long pull with grooves in the bolsters, and the other has a standard nail nick with smooth bolsters. Both have a nice tone to the jigged bone hafts and are mechanically good. Both have been used, but neither has been abused. Of the smaller two-bladed GSA knives, these are the nicest-looking, in our opinion. 

____

Utica Featherweight Mottled Celluloid 1942-45 (WWII Era GSA) Click here to buy

A very clean example of a somewhat scarce WW2 era Girl Scout knife made by Utica from the years 1942 to 1945 with carbon steel blades, mottled green and black celluloid (!), aluminum liners, bolsters, and GSA shield with steel bail. 

This knife has a dulled factory edge with a few stray scratches from use, all other blades are with their original bright finish (NOT buffed), this one is with the spiral punch which was only made '42-45, this model 311 was made with the other regular punch from 1933-45.  

This is a nice find here. Wartime knife production was small, with very little going to the civilian market. For a knife of its period, it's in great shape. 

Keep celluloid out of the sun and high temperatures, it is not as stable as other composite materials and can degrade quickly if poorly treated. 

The Girl Scouts of the USA rallied to the call of duty during World War II, significantly expanding their traditional activities to encompass war-related service. With membership swelling to over one million, they were a force to be reckoned with. Beyond collecting scrap metal and rubber for the war effort, they engaged in numerous other activities. They planted "Victory Gardens" to supplement food supplies, participated in national defense programs by learning first aid and air raid precautions, and even served as messengers on bicycles. Recognizing the importance of morale, they also took on the task of making cookies and sending care packages to soldiers overseas. Their contributions weren't limited to the war front. The Girl Scouts also extended a helping hand to those impacted by the war, assisting with childcare for working mothers and supporting families displaced from their homes. This wartime mobilization showcased the adaptability and resilience of the organization, proving that even young girls could contribute meaningfully to their nation in times of crisis.

___

Assorted Utica Featherweight 2 Blade Black Composite

Assorted Utica Featherweight 2-blade GSA knives from the years 1956 to 1971 with carbon steel blades, jigged black plastic hafts, aluminum liners, bolsters, and 'GS' GSA shield with steel bail. 

These will be selected from a small batch of nearly identical knives, all showing use but in good workable condition. 

Please request sharpening if desired; sold as is unless requested.  

___

Utica Kutmaster 3 5/8" Girl Scouts Knife M310 Near Mint in Box 1947-80 (Voting Right Era GSA)-click here to buy

A near-mint example of the most iconic Girl Scouts folding knife made by Utica Kutmaster from 1947 to 1980 with carbon steel blades, clear acetate handle scales over green plastic with a gold plastic GSA shield, brass liners and nickel bolsters and steel bail. 

This knife still has a very slightly dulled factory edge but no signs of use. All other blades are with their original bright finish (NOT buffed). These are carbon steel, not stainless. The knife is in its original gold cardboard box. 

There are many of these around in very used condition, not so much in near-mint condition as this one. 

During the Civil Rights era, the Girl Scouts of America underwent significant changes, reflecting the broader societal shifts towards racial integration. While initially segregated, the organization began a national effort to desegregate all troops by the 1950s. This move was recognized by Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1956 called the Girl Scouts "a force for desegregation." Despite progress at the national level, local councils and troops, particularly in the South, often resisted integration, leading to conflicts and lawsuits. Some troops even expelled members for promoting civil rights. Nevertheless, many Girl Scouts and leaders actively participated in the movement, advocating for equality and justice. In 1965, black women secured voting rights through the Voters Rights Act.

Suffrage Recipes

Because I promised to include a recipe or food story in my substack, here’s a gem or two. In 2014, I scored a book from Omnivore Books called Pots and Politics, a cookbook pamphlet collection from both the suffrage and women's rights movements. The Suffrage contributions all come with recipes presented in the typical short narration style of the 19th and early 20th century and originally published in 1908 by the Washington Equal Suffrage Association. Dotted throughout are recipes like “Emergency Soup”, and “Salad Dressing That Will Keep for Six Months”. Throughout each section, there are pro-women or pro-suffrage quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Under the Meats section, the quote, “ There is no freedom on earth, nor in any star for those who deny freedom to others,” introduces Roast Beef.

“In thinking of meats, perhaps roast beef comes to our minds. No other meat is so nutritious of properly cooked. The outside must be seared at wants to keep in the juices. To do this either put on a great of a very hot oven or by pressing every side down on a hot pan on top of the range. What is known as rib roast are the best, and one can hardly get the best results with a roast under 10 or 12 pounds.” (pg. 20).

And Fish!

“Cut a pound package of boneless codfish and two small pieces and soak and plenty of water. Poor off the water and cooking water, just letting it come to a boil, parentheses one cooking, will make it tough parentheses. Poor off the water, and cover with milk; here to boiling point; remove the back of stove and starting to be an eggs. If you want it, very nice, indeed, slice for hard, boiled eggs and start in just as you serve.” By Linda Jennings.(pg 43)

For the first ten years of Bernal Cutlery, I often referred to our little knife shop as a pirate ship, which felt something like teasing out the answer Kathy Acker might have had to David Hickey’s question in his essay Pirates and Farmers, “Are you a farmer or a pirate?”. In Hickey’s essay “Pirates and Farmers,” he proposes that there are only two kinds of people in the world: “Farmers are those who build fences and control territory, and pirates are those who tear down fences and cross borders” (Hickey p.17). He drives his point home by claiming one cannot be both, and by the time you are 40, you must know which one you are: a farmer or a pirate.

I’m a hair past 50 now, and as much as David Hickey lit a torch for my generation, I’m not sure I agree with him here on some of the pirate and farmer binary details, but I like the exercise so much that I ask myself the question a lot as a sort of guard rail for my life as a business owner. Sometimes, I find myself wanting to be a farmer. It seems that being a farmer would be easier somehow. But still, after many years of this practice, I know in my bones that our shop, its people, and its business will always be a pirate ship full of pirates doing and making things for other pirates, maybe with a few guest farmers here and there. If someone pressed me hard, I must admit I am a pirate. 

Indeed, 2024 has proved an existential year for Bernal Cutlery, and we’re taking on the growth we always dreamed of. This includes manufacturing our own knives, collaborations with some of our beloved makers, and representing other small businesses we love and adore. At 20 years in, It feels like we’re just getting started, and the energy is up. When our shop was coming out of the pandemic, we were reimagining how we would operate and do business, how our idea of hospitality would be realized, and who we would build community with. 

Today, as a founder, I experience a community growing up around us: our neighbors, our long-time patrons, cooks and tradespeople, our crew, and our international community, including producers of tools, food, and knife makers. The shop feels less like a thing that Josh and I have and more like what a community has. There’s a compelling living history to be read and celebrated in the areas where we source our knives. Additionally, it has been a dream once again to raise a flag for San Francisco’s stellar knife-making. There was a time when knives from San Francisco were known internationally. We’re so excited to take on the challenge and hope you will follow along. 

Yuzukararin was Bernal Cutlery’s North Star 

As Bernal Cutlery rolled out our post-shelter-in-place iteration, we committed to building a pantry program in our front foyer. Of course, this was a general business pivot like many of us were doing. I remember restaurants turned into grocery stores, and a local chef sold prepared food or chili crisps out of their trunks. But, starting a pantry was also a personal move that allowed for some fresh perspective on the joy of working with other small businesses and producers and trying something new. I love the intersection of small business and the hospitality industry for its agility, toughness, creativity, and pride, and I was compelled to align myself with them even more.

Our flagship pantry product and import that we led with, Yuzukararin, was introduced to our shelves in 2021 and holds a special place in my heart. It represented a pivotal moment for us, deciding not to throw in the towel as cynics while we witnessed many local small businesses closing up. Instead, we invested and hired a pantry program buyer just for this expansion, Gil Levy. I remember that Gil and Lisa, our purchasing development director, were just as wide-eyed as I was about introducing this fresh and vibrant addition and supporting its success here in the United States. This, of course, successfully ushered in a more articulated version of our pantry program, and it gave me some hope coming out of that depressed place with COVID. For me, Yuzukararin symbolizes our post-shelter-in-place era, where we shifted from a sole focus on survival and back to a primarily motivated and inspired way of doing business. Yuzukararin made its way into our business the same way you might describe its flavor profile, which is bright. 

The Origin Story of Yuzukararin

The origin story of Yuzukararin,  a Kochi prefecture product,, is very much in the same spirit as Bernal Cutlery's founding as a small business success story. The founder, Ms. Kazuko Yasuzawa, was making a career in insurance sales and found her footing in the spirit of hospitality. It is usually customary for agents in Japan to give candy to their clients, but she decided to be a little different and offer something spicy rather than sweet. She would hand out her yuzu-chili concoction as gifts to her clients, eventually creating what we know as Yuzukararin today. Ms. Yasuzawa  saw an opportunity to develop what we know now as Yuzukararin into a sustainable business. At the time of her retirement from insurance, she started her own business selling this condiment. She would go to wholesalers to source the yuzu, chili, and salt, and hand-grate the yuzu one by one and grate the chili in a suribachi. She would dry-roast the chili in a large wok, and even when using gloves, the chili caused her hands to develop burns–so much that she could not take a bath at night, for it would hurt so much. Making one jar took her 3 hours. Her son told us of a story when she and her husband tried to make Yuzukararin take off in the early days, and it seemed so challenging that they cried while driving home from a tabling event where they barely sold anything.

They struggled at first, it seems quite a bit, but when Ms. Yasuzawa remarried, Yuzukararin truly became a family business with the heart of its production in Mihara. Mihara is a small village on the southwest coast of Kochi, with a population of 1300. It is known to be the town that takes the longest time to travel from Tokyo. With only one traffic light, Mihara has a common phrase to describe its beauty and charm, “There may be nothing here, but there is everything here.” It boasts being downriver from what is said to be Japan’s last remaining clear stream with big temperature differences during morning and night, creating excellent agricultural production for rice and tea and, of course,yuzu. 

Yuzukararin’s main currency is in the potent aromatic green yuzu peel, magnified and deepened with a noticeable but not overwhelming heat and chili flavor. Josh first tried Yuzukararin while sourcing Tosa knives. Besides from being the home to Mihara Village, Kochi prefecture also hosts a unique knife-making tradition. Tosa’s knife making is known for its strong preference of making ryoba knives (double bevel vs kataba single bevel) meant for the cooks, farmers, fishermen, and hunters as a utilitarian with a down-home inaka (Japanese country) feel. These knives are well forged and heat-treated with top-quality steel and often minimalist finish grinding and handling. They are all about the best value for the money and don’t have much vanity or stiff formality.

Kochi is also known for its Sawachi cuisine, generosity, and community spirit. Sawachi is a feast that celebrates ‘okyaku’ – a word that in Kochi means more than just a 'guest'—and is all about sharing large platters artfully arranged, reflecting local produce, and celebrating community. This tradition started in the Edo period as a way for lords to show hospitality, bringing out a big spread all at once for all to enjoy. 

So, as we approach the end of 2024, we’re planning Bernal Cutlery's future, and we see Yuzukararin at the table with our knife-making partners, crew, and collaborators, coming together with a big spread and a full heart. I’m so proud to share Bernal Cutlery’s platform with a woman-founded family business like Yuzukarain; inspired by her story and stellar product, I am honored she trusts us to represent her family company in the US.  

Most of the Russell and San Francisco knives that I am the current chaperone of were from the estate of Don Rich, who took a special interest in focusing his many decades of knife collecting on J. Russell Green River Works, A.J. Jordan and the San Francisco makers Will & Finck and Michael Price. 

I suspect Don decided I wasn’t a putz when I told him about my time as a foundryman casting bronze. We discovered he was from the same town as my grandmother, Norman, Oklahoma.

I didn’t completely understand his collecting focus at the time 15 years ago when I traded knives with him, his old Sabatier, Solingen-made knives, and others for the J. Russell or A.J. Jordan knives that I found. I kept the few SF-made things I found, but they were just a few scattered knives at the time compared to Don’s collection of San Francisco carving sets. 

When I bumped into Don at the Flea Market or went out to his West Oakland foundry to trade knives, he was a friendly, smart guy with an equally bad poker face as me when making trades, and I also learned that he also took no shit. He told me about how, after his daughter was born, he chased out the crack dealers from a playground near his West Oakland workshop with his old M1 Garand rifle. 

Don was Native American and a proud veteran. I don’t think we always agreed on politics, but we shared an enthusiasm and enjoyed sharing what we had been learning. I wished I could have asked him more about his perspective on the history of many of his knives related to the westward expansion of the 19th century. Maybe today, I have a possible window into what he might have been compelled to learn more of, given the histories of these makers. I know they made exceptional knives that were unique and distilled to something essential to the time and place they occupied. 

Given that Don’s collection is with me now, it's up to me to interpret their significance and the story they are telling together. I never placed a premium on old knives strictly on where they were made, but maybe the more far-off origins held more romance. In the last few years, I have found myself hanging onto the old and historically emblematic pieces of American cutlery, waiting for their stories to reveal themselves. It is as if they have quiet and well-mannered ghosts who are waiting for a quorum amongst themselves.

Maybe this old American cutlery is more significant right now as it also can bring seemingly different groups of people together. In this way, trying to tell their stories brings me a sense of connection with people I might not otherwise mix with. It always makes me feel a little irrationally hopeful, looking for the better qualities we Americans share. 

Writing about American culinary knives offers a big challenge; even with a relatively short history, American knives reflect a wide range of food traditions and economic realities. While everything but what is truly Indigenous is imported here in the USA, hardly anybody and anything stays in its imported state once acclimated. People, food, and knives all evolve to their new homes, and all become American in their own way. Foodways and their requisite knives come into use and production with new people or new ideas. Cross-pollination in foodways and knife style adaptations sometimes happen quickly, and at others, old patterns persist seemingly past their expiration.

There's a much larger story here than what I have sketched out. This is intended to give some context and not be an exhaustive account. Learning about these American knife origins points to much larger stories, implying that this is the complete story that would short-change us all. That said, I would like to share a bit about two places. I have spent a little time in Massachusetts and lived for 30 years in San Francisco. This covers a good amount of ground, literally and figuratively. I hope these stories show how culinary knives are important historical markers far outside the kitchen or dining room and that you can’t keep the kids (or knives) on the farm. 

                                               Independence / dependence

While the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, independence wasn’t actualized until after the war in 1789. Similarly, material independence from Britain wasn’t complete initially; the fledgling United States of America still relied on Great Britain for finished goods, especially cutlery. While there were abundant blacksmiths in the early United States, iron production was an important part of colonial exports to Great Britain, especially with the abundant forests of North America providing the charcoal that fueled the pre-and early Industrial Revolution. American iron production was seen as a possible threat during the colonial period, and the 1750 Iron Act prohibited the new establishment of American iron production and the manufacture of steel in the colonies. 

However, nothing in America came close to providing what Sheffield, England, did for cutlery in the newly ex-colonies. The combination of generations of skilled specialized craftsmen and the growing Industrial Revolution in Britain, which brought even greater muscle to Sheffield’s output, meant that the ex-colonists in the US were still largely laboring along pre-industrial modes when it came to cutlery. American cutlery manufacture outside the individual multipurpose blacksmith shop is generally recognized to have begun in 1818 with Henry Harrington in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ames Manufacturing also produced knives and numerous other items in Chicopee Falls, Mass.

While Harrington and Ames were making knives in an organized manufacturing type fashion, they were supplying a relatively small amount to their local areas; John Russell arguably was the one who gave the British a run for their knife money in the American market with knives made in the Western Massachusetts town of Greenfield under his Green River Brand. In 1834, the J Russell company made chisels with British-made steel and then expanded to axes. Woodworking and tree felling were important elements of early 19th-century American life, and his tools found a good audience. 

The new American cutlery-making enterprises did not have Sheffield's multi-generational workers or the network of associated craftsmen and suppliers. Initially, all machinery was made by American workshop operators. Cutlery was made with locally produced iron and steel or with imported British steel. Sheffield-made shear steel still had a reputation as the best, and for good reason. 

In his new chisel and axe-making factory, John Russell utilized trip hammers inspired by Robert Orr’s scythe workshop in Bridgewater, CT. Similar to those used in Europe. While initially home-spun, the use of machinery in cutlery production was an important focus. While not unique to cutlery manufacture in Europe, American manufacturers' early and eager acceptance of machinery was an important element in the rapid development of the American cutlery industry and persisted into the 20th century. This allowed for greater productivity, especially as American cutlery workers tended not to be independent contractors as they were in many European sectors, and setting up a large workshop was more possible.

It is important to emphasize that skilled labor was a key element here. Of course, there was no such thing as automation at this time, so machinery did not do the work per se but enabled greater output and the ability to make the same thing over and over at a lower cost. Russell expanded to knife production a few years after the chisel and axe production as he expanded the grinding capability of his shop.

                                                          Trade War

Before long, Sheffield noticed Russell’s growing footprint in the American market, and a trade war ensued. The British lowered export prices to squeeze Russell and the other American cutlery firms out of business. Through innovations in production and the poaching of Sheffield workers with higher wages than those available at home, Russell succeeded in not just holding off the British but securing a large section of the American market. 

Sheffield was by no means beaten regarding the American cutlery market. Their large, diversified skilled workforce occupying both small independent shops and larger steelmaking operations gave them a huge market in America up until the Civil War in the 1860s, after which the British share of the American market was squeezed into a much smaller portion with new American trade tariffs and a much more robust American manufacturing sector. 

The short, sanitized version of the Russell story is this: Russell expanded shortly after the Civil War and became, for a short period, the largest cutlery factory in the world at Turner’s Falls in Massachusetts. The financial success of the mid-19th century would not continue as consistently for the J Russell Green River works. Eventually, Russell joined with rival Harrington Cutlery Co in the 1930s to form the now ubiquitous American cutlery manufacturer Dexter-Russell. 

When looked at in a fuller context, the J Russell history is a great illustration of how knife history is always more than just how people make and use knives. The J Russell story is the story of 19th-century American expansion, both economic and physical, bringing us directly into contact, warts and all, with the better and lesser angels of this history. 

The drive for independence, inventiveness, and dedication of New England’s Industrial origins must be reconciled with some of the less savory economics of the day. The J Russell Green River Works was only possible with money John Russell made speculating on cotton in the early 1830s in the new territory of Georgia. This connection in industrial New England was not unique, directly or indirectly. It should be mentioned that slave labor, through cotton, substantially benefited the economics of New England's textile mills. 

Russell successfully produced knives for the westward expansion. By establishing the process to manufacture thousands of these affordable, reliable knives daily, the company's financial backbone was established by the 1850s. For settlers, Russell’s simple butcher knives doubled as kitchen knives, utility knives, and weapons. ‘Up to Green River’ was a saying for something done to good measure, supposedly referencing the quality of Russell Green River knives or stabbing someone up to the Green River mark. 

Russell enjoyed runaway success, especially with the enormous volume of knives sent out west until the financial crisis following the panic of 1873, which brought harsh lessons to the country at large about, among other things, the limits of companies' ability to value and issue their own stock. Russell's ability to maintain expansion after this time was limited, and near financial disasters were averted and encountered repeatedly.

Despite the precarious financial nature of Russell’s later 19th-century years, they produced some exceedingly beautiful knives. In the 1880s to 1920s, some downright bizarre carved handles graced Russell’s catalogs, alligators carved from stag antlers, geese, horses, flowers, and Beaux-Arts geometric designs. The quality of the grinding and finishing of knives from this period is stunning; it was a true golden age of American knifemaking in the factories of the East, with a density of skilled labor that rivaled that of Sheffield, Solingen, or Thiers. 

The history of 20th-century cutlery manufacture in New England is more complicated than can be summarized in a few quick lines, but by the end of the 20th century, it was mostly gone, especially at the intersection of skilled handwork and industrial technique that formed the backbone of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

For me, rather than being an easy source of moral superiority (it's easy to feel smug when looking at others past or present) or simply a picturesque graveyard, the first act of American knifemaking in New England offers me a lot of inspiration. Working to tease out how hand work and machine processes were done is essential for really understanding a huge chunk of the last two hundred years of culinary knife making and for teasing out how the golden ages of cutlery in the USA, Sheffield, Solingen Thiers, etc worked and despite the illusion of the solitary master blacksmith Japan today. 

When Elias Sideras and I designed and started the initial production of the Greenfield Gyuto, we looked at how the knifemakers of New England solved problems of production knife-making, especially in the handle, and how work knives were ground and finished. This was squished through the playdough mold of our imaginations, imagining if New England knifemaking had been done to supply late 19th century Japan with their Kanto gyuto, Japan’s first chef knife, a recent Western import. 

The industrial process we have to assist us in our fledgling endeavor differs from what was available in 19th—and early 20th-century New England. There have been many improvements in worker safety. I am relieved not to choose between grinding knives and not getting ‘grinder’s consumption’—silicosis from the old natural stone wheels. I hope it is possible to bridge the gulf between handmade and manufactured American knives again; despite the foibles of their time, the New England knifemakers were on to something and did a great job of bringing the pleasure of fine cutlery to a wide swath of Americans. 

I love when the admittedly great Joseph Rodgers company of Sheffield proudly boasted “Cutlers to her /his majesty,” and several of New England’s makers (Harrington Cutlery and LF&C) retorted, “Cutlers to the American people.” Count me in. 

                                         San Francisco as knife-making center

A few years after the Mexican Secession of the West in 1848 and with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, San Francisco was thrust into center stage among the new American West Coast cities. Aside from straddling the entrance to San Francisco Bay, it was an unlikely candidate as an important city, which gave it potential military significance. But being in the middle of nowhere, it was essentially guarding nothing in 1848. 

San Francisco’s meteoric and slapdash growth after the discovery of gold inland in 1849 left it ill-prepared to supply the new arrivals headed inland as well as for its new occupants. Manufactured goods (knives included) had to make the long trip around Cape Horn. If shipments arrived at all,, there was no knowing what condition they might arrive in, and even if everything worked out with delivery, the items would be exorbitantly priced. Being physically isolated from the Eastern center of American manufacturing and ports of import from Europe, the need for homegrown industry was great.

In 1852, the most easily plucked gold started to dry up in the placer deposits of the Sierra Nevada’s foothills. San Francisco’s first knife maker, Hugh McConnell,, set up shop making bowie knives, surgical instruments, and some culinary knives for the newly established retailers who found a brisk trade with new arrivals and those returning with gold from the interior. Records are sparse, but several skilled cutlers arrived in San Francisco to work in the 1850s. McConnell hired cutler Herman Schintz from Switzerland and Frederick Will from New York to help him in his shop, and a distinctive San Francisco cutlery style emerged. McConnell passed away in 1863, but the industry he helped set in motion will continue to gather steam.

The first S.F.-made cutlery was not cheap, nor was it cheaply made. The knives made by San Francisco makers were arguably the best in the country then. San Francisco knives were made to express the discernment and wealth amassed by the gold-seekers, successful business people in S.F., and the pride of the local craftsmen referred to in the day as mechanics. The good times, drinking, grand feasts, and the city’s essentially unpoliced, violent, seedy side are all reflected in the culinary and bowie knives that evolved.

The 1860s saw great prosperity in San Francisco from the wealth generated by the discovery of silver in Nevada’s Comstock Load. While San Francisco is associated with the gold rush of 1849, the Comstock Load was a much larger source of spending and growth for San Francisco, and local-made knives were not neglected in the shopping sprees of those who struck it rich.

In the 1860s, Schintz opened his own shop, and in 1863, Fred Will took over McConnell’s workshop and formed S.F.’s iconic cutlery firm Will & Finck, having joined forces with Julius Finck, a locksmith and bell hanger. Will & Finck would become the largest of SF cutlery firms with their finger in many pies: locksmithing, bell-hanging, manufacturing agricultural hand tools, gambling equipment (both crooked and straight) and cutlery; surgical equipment, razors, fancy bowies and push daggers, barware, and fine cutlery sets. 

In 1869, the transcontinental railroad connected Alameda across the SF Bay to the East Coast, and not long after, San Francisco knives were noticed by the rest of the country. After the 1871 Mechanics Fair in San Francisco, The ‘California carver’ became famous, and imitations sprung up from the larger Eastern manufacturers, especially copying the hump-backed offset design canonized by the various SF knife makers. The ‘antennae’ style guard found its way into production at this time as well. The California carver style crossed the Atlantic before long, and British and European copies are not too hard to find. These would have all been far less expensive than the genuine article, but these copies, too, found a place in the shops of San Francisco alongside the originals, especially later in the century at the enormous Will & Finck emporiums. Will & Finck even began to re-brand from Eastern makers. 

Michael Price learned the cutler's craft from his father in Limerick, Ireland, and emigrated to San Francisco in the 1850s. He most likely worked with other early knifemakers before opening his shop on Mongomery Street between Bush and Pine. Price offered surgical tools, razors, carving sets, and bowies guaranteed to cut through three silver dollars. 

Michael Price Sr. joined his son in San Francisco in 1865 and began working making cutlery with his son.

By the end of the 1960s, San Francisco knife makers Will & Finck and Michael Price had aggressively promoted their work throughout California, creating impressive displays at the Mechanics Fairs showcasing local goods.

Like Will & Finck, Michael Price Jr. employed many skilled cutlers to help manufacture custom orders and items in his shop. By the 1880s, the sporting goods stock in his shop began to eclipse the cutlery, and Price Jr. mostly spent time at the boxing ring under his shop. The production of cutlery slowed. Michael Price died in 1889, a few years after his father died. 

A new crime wave at the end of the 1860s and multiple financial crises in the early 1870s saw a decline in the city's prosperity, and the important Mechanics Fairs faced difficulties from lower attendance and growing lawlessness. However, San Francisco makers insisted on making the best knives possible and boasted of using one of the best steels available –Brooklyn Steelwork’s Chrome Steel.

In the mid-1870s, with the rail connection to the rest of the United States, the cat was out of the bag regarding San Francisco-made cutlery. San Francisco-made carving sets became in demand from a whole new world of customers, and the Eastern manufacturers took note of creating their own ‘California carvers.’ These new imitations were made at various price points and different quality levels, lux sets for the well-to-do swells joined cheaply made sets within reach for the masses. As is the case now, knife makers worldwide were promiscuous, and copies of San Francisco’s distinctive style emerged not only from the big Eastern manufacturers but also from across the Atlantic. 

Back home in San Francisco, as the 19th century enters its last act, the rabid hunger for locally made knives fades. The wandering budget-minded eye of the public strays to cheaper Eastern US and European imports (which now did not have to travel around Tierra del Fuego), and of course, the local merchants took advantage of an opportunity. At this point, Will & Finck’s successful emporium stocked many OEM knives and razors made in New England and Europe, and their brand name and Eastern-made knives bore the Will & Finck logo. 

The number of knife-making shops staffed by the local cutlers busy at their trade moving from shop to shop sharing craft secrets had greatly declined when the 1906 earthquake hit. After the earthquake, fires had their way with San Francisco’s wooden buildings, and the city's rebuilding did not include knife-makers. Will & Finck continued as a retail establishment, but San Francisco’s history as a knife-making town had essentially ended. Today, this part of San Francisco’s history is largely unknown despite being an important element of the city’s distinctive evolution. 

I have hoarded a small collection of San Francisco-made carving sets and barware over the years of buying and selling vintage knives. Even at the height of my dawn patrol flea market scouring, when there seemed to be many more old knives to be found than today, they rarely surfaced. At the time, the culinary knives and barware never paid much more than more common New England or English carving sets, in contrast to the bowie knives from old San Francisco, which fetch incredible sums.

More important than the monetary value of San Francisco’s old culinary knives is their connection to the ingenuity and pride involved in the craftsmen who developed and produced them in the weird cauldron that was San Francisco. San Francisco’s ability to bring people from all over the world together is still alive and well. I am very proud to add to its culinary knife history even if in a small way with Bernal Cutlery.

We just released the first knife in a series inspired by visits to historical knife-making centers this past year. This one is a chef knife inspired by Thiers, France, and I think it is the perfect introduction to this ongoing project. 

In the summer of ‘23, various crew members and Eli Sederis returned to Thiers after being unable to return for many years. This trip was with Eli and a few members of our crew to meet new and old contacts in and around Thiers, learn more about the current production going on, and hopefully learn more about technique history, eat some Saint Nectaire cheese, and possibly, you know, find some old knives. All these goals were very much accomplished. It was great to see old friends in Thiers and also to connect faces with names that have existed solely in emails for years, and to spend some time getting the Thiers backstory, which is everywhere in Thiers. Some surprisingly lucky finds would have made the trip worth it on their own. Still, most importantly, I got an opportunity to connect more dots in the Thiers story and better understand the development of four essential types of French knives: plate semelle, cuisine massive, Canadian, and Ideal. 

The plate semelle or flat sole blade is a very old work knife design consisting of a forged blade tapering in thickness along the tang and blade from the beginning of the blade at the handle. Often the tang would be iron forge welded to the steel blade to both economize on steel and to make drilling the holes for the rivets easier. Plate semelle knives would be handled in wood, horn or in this knife's case cow bone. 

While Thiers has undoubtedly had very skilled cutlers for hundreds of years, and extremely fine-made knives are still produced here, the plate semelle knife holds a spirit of practicality and simplicity. It draws a connection to the pre-industrial roots of Thiers. Made as sturdy work knives, the simple design of the plate semelle is at the core of Thiers’ history as the center of practical knife making, which is arguably the reason Thiers was prepared to become the center of knife making in France after the revolution and why it is the main cutlery manufacturing center of France today.

Kelly has an old plate semelle chef knife given to her by Philippe Bournilhas of K Sabatier on our first trip to Thiers in 2016. It is an antique new old stock plate semelle 7” chef knife from the late 19th century with the old K Sabatier marking of ‘65 Perrier’ with an off-white cow bone handle riveted with iron and brass rosette rivets. It's not every day that an old stock knife from the 19th century comes our way, but the temptation to use it was too great. At the risk of sharpening it down too quickly with daily use, it now only comes out to help mark time for the cutting of birthday cakes. It has taken on immense sentimental value in our house as it now holds our family’s history along with its own. 

Starting our series of one-off knives inspired by our travels with this one seems perfect. It holds in itself all the design iterations that follow historically. With a different emphasis on forging and grinding, the plat semelle transforms into all subsequent designs that are in themselves important markers of history and time. The plain bone handle on this one, to me, invites the contributions its new owner will make and holds space for the marking of time that awaits it. You can even look at this knife collaboration on our website here; and then you can also watch us talk a little bit more in-depth on this series on YouTube. We are dying to see what Eli makes for Sheffield, Germany, and Japan, and you should, too!

In the later part of the 19th century, the industrial drop forge was introduced into Thiers initially in sizes appropriate for table knives and scissors. A smaller rope and pulley hand-operated drop forge had been in use for folding knife blades. Still, with the growing popularity of eating with table knives over the previous personal folding knives in the mid-19th century, both sped production and encouraged new designs. Adding a full tang handle to the short bolstered triangular Cuisine Massive / AKA Nogent style pattern birthed the ‘Canadian’ style knife. Both forms were adapted to use the drop forge to speed up the initial forming in the forging process, alongside the old mechanical hammers to refine the geometry before hand-grinding. 

The multi-ton blows of the dies on the hammer and anvil of a drop forge can rough form a knife blade much faster than drawing out a knife blade from a steel bar on the older martinet mechanical hammers. Drop forges need exponentially more force to forge out a large shape, so these drop-forged blanks were still relying on the skilled smiths at the martinet to draw out the blades and tangs. 

As railroads arrived to bring coal to and electricity became more commonly added to water power in Thiers in the early 20th century, the geography of grinding and forging changed. No longer tied to the river valley, electric-powered grinding and forging spread throughout the neighboring hills around Thiers.

In 1920s Thiers, the switch from water power was nearly complete although some small older workshops on the Durolle were still at work. Most of these old style grinding workshops family run in stone buildings on the Durolle only had a few years left in 1930; many were already shuttered. Factories powered by electricity were more productive and are now becoming more cost-effective. The inexpensive muscle that Thiers propelled itself with could not compete with the now inexpensive muscle of electric engines. At one of these new factories (new in terms of new technology, it used to be an ox shoe factory) one of the new drop forges Mr. Saint-Rémois Dulac made an important innovation at his forge when he blended the full tang and integral bolster of the Canadian pattern with the secondary applied ferrule ring of the Cuisine Massive / Nogent style and created the now iconic ‘Ideal’ pattern that included an integrally forged ferrule ring / bolster to a flat full tang chef knife. Dulac did not patent his development, and before long, not only did all the other Thiers makers make an ‘Ideal’ pattern forged knife into their lineups, but the design took off so well that 10 years later, it had spread to be a staple of other knife making centers; J.A. Henckels, in their 1930 catalog, included a ‘Sabatier pattern’ in the Ideal form. 

The 1920s also saw the growth of the automobile and automobile travel. Earlier in 1889, the Michelin brothers started the Michelin Guide from the company’s headquarters in Clermont Ferrand (across the valley from Thiers). The first iteration of the Michelin guide was free and had information on where to purchase Michelin tires, where to find gasoline, and other travel tips. It wasn’t until 1920 that they began to charge seven Francs for the guide and expanded it to include hotels and restaurants in Paris and beyond that the Guide took off. It had struggled to gain readership, and supposedly, one of the Michelin brothers had a revelation that it was devalued by being free when he saw a stack of them propping up a bench in a mechanics shop. Secret diners or restaurant inspectors supported the new restaurant reviewing section. In 1926, the famous star system started with a simple one-star being given to recommended restaurants. 

The restaurants reviewed invariably would have cooks using the new Ideal pattern knives and 

it is now arguably the iconic French chef knife, having mostly taken off, especially after the middle of the 20th century when the seeds of the culinary revolution planted in the 1920s took off further propelling the French culinary knives and especially the Ideal. 

While Germanized versions of the ‘Canadian’ are still in large production in Thiers, as they have become a very popular European chef knife (more on that later in Solingen) this Thiers-grown Ideal is still the champ. 

Merci boucoup, Mssr. Dulac!

**You can check out the Nouvel Ideal line we did with K-Sabatier here.

We finally got the Konosuke X Bernal Cutlery Ko-Sabaki knife back in stock. It was the first ever Bernal Cutlery collaboration we did, and getting it back in stock right now gave some perspective to all the collaborations we have happening and made me grateful to get to work with cooks, butchers, bakers, and, of course, knife makers.

Initially, getting the Ko-Sabaki back seemed like weird timing as we were just releasing a butchery knife that had some overlap with the Ko-Sabaki, the Invictus. The Invictus collaboration was done with butcher Dylan Carasco and K Sabatier in Theirs, France, and was years in the making from the first conversation I had with Dylan. He has dedicated himself to learning butchery wholeheartedly. He has sought out some of the best tutelage, moving to new hemispheres and continents on more than one occasion to work in butcher shops that have high standards. Dylan especially got immersed in French butchery in Paris, and we bonded over discussing the old-style French butcher knives. Not many people use them here in the States and can compare them to the more commonly used knives here, so I learned a lot getting to pick his brain and getting reports back on old and new French butcher knives he picked up from us. Dylan tweaked the handle and tip of a super old French boning knife; the sainger and the Invictus were in motion. Philippe at K Sabatier was able to help us get several handles and blade thicknesses,, and I did several different grinding adjustments on the tip. Dylan put lots of miles on them at work, and some went out to Dylan’s butchery colleagues.

The Ko-Sabaki also started from conversations with butchers and cooks doing butchery at their restaurants. When the knife was first conceived around 2015, we had many cooks coming into our old Guerrero St shop looking for Japanese knives for butchery. It was a bit of a Goldilocks and the Three Bears moment often, as the knives available for the fine work of trimming and seaming were very different from knives capable of breaking. Honesuki maru (aka honkatsu) was too bulky once sharpened in a little and had a strong asymmetry that led to pitching to one side during cutting. Petty knives were popular for butchery in restaurants (butchers would NEVER do this), but the sharp heel snags and the small handles are not ideal for a firm grip with cold greasy/wet hands.

At the time, I was doing a lot more handling on Wa (Japanese style) handed knives and had loose Sakai Konosuke blades around the shop. I re-ground and joined different handles and the old HD and GS (pre-HD2 and GS+) blades after changing the shape of the heel and getting some out into the hands of local cooks and butchers. The crucial testing was on. Kosuke Kawamura from Sakai Konosuke was super supportive and helped me figure out handle options, sayas, and packaging, and before too long, the word came back that the SLD GS was the perfect steel for the job. I was putting them all together as they came in, re-grinding the new blades, gluing the handles, and drilling the saya pins. It was more work than receiving already assembled knives and gave me a renewed appreciation for the Konosuke detail finish work on the handles. I was worried that Kosuke would tell me that my work was too messy, but nobody told on me, and it got better. On return visits to Sakai, I got to see how Konosuke and other Japanese makers handled and were able to incorporate some tricks into my work. The blades that we settled on went through several iterations, getting thinner and harder, then thicker again, and finally with wide kireba bevels instead of a convex hamaguri shape. The handle changed from a rounder horn-ferruled octagonal ho or hinoki to a taller octagonal laurel wood.  At every change, different feedback came in; sometimes, you can get 4 butchers and have 5 opinions, but I also learned how a lot of different people worked and could put that on the scales when comparing notes.

The Ko-Sabaki hasn’t been on our wall for a long time as the blade production was very backed up. I’m hoping the next batch doesn’t also take years, but it’s nice to have them back and to be reminded of the spirit that our collaborations were born in It is a nice opportunity to reflect on how this spirit of collaboration has helped our understanding of the intersection of food and knifemaking grow. 

Some of our upcoming collaborations are us tweaking tried and true designs that have stood the test of time but we see changes in how users approach them, and others are re-imaginings of old knives and food and knife history. It's a very exciting time here at Bernal Cutlery and I’m super happy to be starting 2024 with the culmination of many years of past work starting to bear sharp steely fruit. 

You can pre-order The Greenfield Gyuto here. These knives are a limited production of 200. Each knife will be numbered.

For many years, the idea of making a knife percolated in my mind; it always seemed 4 steps out of reach, so it lived in the junk drawer of my consciousness.  

The last few years have seen me rummaging around in those junk drawers a bit, not out of a lack of other pressing things but maybe because of the realization that if I don’t do things I’d like to do, another decade will pass by, and there might never be a ‘good time’ to do them. I have learned that when an opportunity presents itself, it’s good not to argue sometimes and that productive procrastination can be just as good a form of motivation. 

Elias Sideris

We immediately talked about old knives when Elias Sideris came into the old Guerrero St Bernal Cutlery. He lived in New England and was familiar with the old knives we had at hand. It was a J Russell Green River knife that our first conversation was about. It was great finding someone interested in the same niche knife history stuff I was and could learn from. Shortly afterward, Eli asked my opinion on a stamp he was making for his own Astral brand, and I thought it was brilliant, a kind of house-shaped lantern deep set in a square stamp; of course, I followed the knifemaking he was doing. I really liked his aesthetic and appreciated his nods to old knife-making. It was super inspiring seeing someone integrate this history into knife-making without doing reductive LARPy one-liners.  After he moved from Greenfield, Mass, to the Bay Area during the pandemic, we got back in touch, and I was able to score a few of his Astral Brand chef knives for the shop, and they sold immediately. I also got to keep one. I couldn’t help but use it; it was well worth devaluing it; it's a gem. 

The Kaiten

Later, Eli helped us build a large-scale Japanese grinding machine with an enormous stone wheel I had gotten from Japan that came with some old machine components. I thought it would be a relatively simple thing, but I am a crap fabricator. I knew this was a project I should get someone competent to help with. To put the context on how I best work, I got into sculpture in a previous incarnation in my late teens and early 20s. Everything I did was totally reductive; I carved everything, no building, no welding. This is how I am. If I build something that requires measuring and exact fitting joints, it looks like those experiments of spiderwebs made by spiders on different drugs, and not the ones where everything is tight and exact but unfinished, the really messed up ones. It really makes sense that sharpening appeals to me as it is also completely reductive, only removing metal to shape and form new edges.

Eli did a great job on the Kaiten Mizu Toishi grinder, milling the old cast iron hubs so that the wheel has no vibration when it runs, and I can reduce knives to my heart's content. Here, you can see a short video compilation of Eli’s work from a social media post last year.

Undertaking Knife Making

It might sound obvious, but you never know what it’s like to work with someone until you work with them, and it was great working with Eli. After some discussions, he mentioned that he was interested in the production side of knifemaking, which is a bit different than making one-of-a-kind pieces, so the seed was planted to consider what we might make together.  Around this time, I had the opportunity to buy a collection of knives from local sculptor and fellow flea market regular Don Rich, who had, sadly, recently passed away. I knew Don, and several years back, we had done a lot of trading. He was especially interested in knives from the J. Russell Green Works of Greenfield, Mass., A. J. Jordan of Sheffield, England, and 19th-century San Francisco knives by Will & Finck and Michael Price. I had a bin of knives to trade with Don, and when it would fill up, I would go out to his foundry in West Oakland and look for old Sabatiers or other old culinary knives he was less interested in, and I knew I could transform into bags of groceries and paid bills. He had massive old map flat files filled with knives, and it was a wonderland. Years later, in the summer of 2022, his wife Megan and daughter Katie had placed all the knives in plastic bins. I gathered them all up in the emptied-out kitchen downstairs from where the flat files had been and where Don would make hundreds of pies every year for Thanksgiving and give them to friends. They were really, really good pies. I appraised the knives, I remembered trading some of the knives years back. There was more of the secondary stuff one keeps when collecting that is less important but hard to get rid of, and more importantly, the prized finds that I remembered looking at with Don and getting to know about for the first time. Megan and I settled on a price for the lot. It was more than I could afford by sensible accounting, but I felt responsible for seeing them through and ensuring that Megan got a fair price. I knew that the vultures must have been circling them and that somehow it would work out for me to drain the coffers for a minute to ensure they got put to good work. 

As Eli and I were hashing out how we would make a knife that had that old combination of hand work and industrial process, we were hashing out different ways to integrate a forged construction. We kept running into a few snags and found ourselves coming back to the necessity of forging on the first design that we did. From a purely functional standpoint, with many of the steels available, it wasn’t completely necessary to forge to get a great performing blade. For the first model, it definitely made sense to consider a stock removal knife with blades cut from sheets of high-quality steel. 

After going over dozens of old knives that Eli and I have separately collected over the years and a bunch from the Don Rich collection, we kept returning to a few approaches to construction that seemed super compelling and specific to New England. It went without saying that a chef knife was definitely the first one we would do as it is the central knife in so many kitchens; the old-style Kanto Gyuto has always been a kind of North Star for me regarding blade geometry; thin (like many old hand-made culinary knives from all over the globe) and with a tip with a minimal curve to it, formed from the spine coming to meet the edge. 

I had a blade edge geometry that I was fixed on after doing some experiments and had done some collaborations with a small smith in Tosa, Japan. I really liked the outline and wanted to do it in a thinner single-steel construction, so we tried it. Eli came up with a beautiful, straight-sided handle, slightly flared at the heel like the old Massachusetts knives we liked, and with a milled pinned bolster that held the scales in. I’d like to say we tried a bunch of other designs. Still, this one really nailed what we were after, and only slight modifications to the length of the neck between the heel of the blade and handle, as well as handle thickness, were changed after working with prototypes in different steels. 

Once some of the prototype Greenfield Gyutos were in hand and used, the idea that this knife could have been made in New England for the Japanese market in the late 19th century didn’t seem implausible. While it didn’t happen, it could very well have that in the 1870s or ’80s as Japanese culinary culture was going through the massive upheaval of the Meiji period, bringing beef and pork into the Japanese diet and the Western chef knife along with it that a Japanese blacksmith could have traveled to the knifemaking capital of the United States in Massachusetts. If this blacksmith had come to the USA to learn how to forge and grind the Western chef knife instead of going to Europe, Japanese sensibilities of knife use could have been introduced, as well as the opportunity to supply this new market. 

While most American knife makers were focused on the massive and expanding American market and wresting it from domination by the British and Europeans, their designs in the late 19th century were incredibly promiscuous. The Americans were liberally copying designs from the British (naturally, with Sheffield dominating imports) and from the French, who were influencing the Germans who were in the late 19th century, massively increasing their industrial capacity and building a huge skilled labor pool. Sheffield, Thiers, and Solingen all rode on each other's coattails with successful changes in how people cooked in the kitchen and ate at the table. New methods of production utilizing more efficient techniques like the drop forge were also driving design innovation.

Once we had a little riff going about the alternative history of our knife, the issue of packaging design really opened up. My wife and Bernal Cutlery co-conspirator Kelly had been collecting books on Japanese package design from the 19th and early 20th century that she had been using with our design team, Marco Antoniolli and Angus Haller. They had come up with some really beautiful packages with Marco’s illustrations, and going in this vein, the Greenfield Gyuto box was on its way with the addition of some 19th-century New England knife boxes. 

While the influence from Japan to the West still had another century to hit (and, oh, how it has), it is interesting to ask why more Japanese culinary innovations didn’t spread along with the fascination with Japanese design in the ‘Japonisme’ craze of the 1860s and ’70s which introduced Japanese motifs in gardening, architecture, art, etc. With the Greenfield Gyuto we posit that it not only could have happened but did, albeit a century and a half later. With this knife, we are looking at the chef knife through a 19th-century lens and applying today’s cooking sensibilities, which in many ways have stayed consistent with the demands of professional cooks over the centuries.  

Looking at this knife, I am immensely proud, not because I’m such a genius and figured this all out alone but because I found myself a conduit to keep this history alive. A knife seems made from hard, unyielding materials, but once you get to know them, they are immensely fluid, slippery little beasts that seem to take on their own lives. I’m super grateful to be able to do this with these super talented people and of course, these knives that found me. 

                                       A Personal History of Bernal Cutlery
                                                    Smelling Old Things
                                      Blowing Your Checkers in Steel Cities

Recipes: 
Josh’s Anarchist Pie in Honor of Don Rich
Kelly’s Pittsburgh in San Francisco Halushky 

“How did you get into this knife thing?” In the beginning, Josh and I found that we both really loved a few things that we had in common: old things, smelling old things, music, and drinking heavily.  Reading Josh's substack paying homage to Don Rich’s knife collection, I could easily conjure up exactly how Don’s foundry and workshop smelled. It was the perfect mix of sunshine, old and new metal living together in a dusty artist's studio, and when you walked through the downstairs space, there was also the smell of cooking oil from his large kitchen. Don and his wife raised a daughter in the West Oakland live-work artists' studio. By the time I met her, she was an adult, so you could easily say you could smell the echo of a childhood’s worth of cooking coming out of the kitchen, along with all the years of the pie-making they did, I suppose. 

The best smell combination came from upstairs in his living areas: cardboard, metal dust, wood, leather, and cigars. There were books, too, so I remember that sweet old book smell.  He gave us a tour of his space when our son, Charlie, was 3; we were guests at his annual foundry’s “New Year's First Pour Party.” On the second floor, there was a long hallway with quite a lot of boxes off to the side lining the walkway, all filled with decades of his knife-collecting spoils, and at the end was an office where he hung a large collection of Gold Rush-era San Francisco-made knives; Michael Price and Will & Finck graced this wall in a glass cabinet. I remember envying Don’s sweet family story and the life of a working artist he managed to make for himself in Oakland, but just as much, I envied those boxes of dusty knives. I wanted to sit on the floor, go through each box, smell the knives, and try to tell their story. It was a longing that stayed with me for a while. 

I know this smelling thing is weird, but I must tell you that at the time of this writing, Josh and I have one grown child and a couple of middle-sized teenagers behind him. I realize now that our entire family smells almost everything we examine with interest, like a group of monkeys. We arrange our memory landscape by smell as if we are psychically trying to boil down the essence of that which is compelling. Usually, it’s the first act in the puzzle of tracing a history and figuring out the story. There’s the historiographies, the manufacturing, and the material. Then there is the mystery of the knives' stories that we will never know; it is hard not to consider them trying to tell us something. Proust’s madeleines were about conjuring personal and deeply connecting memories through smell as a powerful agent. But what is it when reading an anonymous old object through its smell? I think it’s as if we’re looking for a radio signal of another time and its people; maybe it’s a desire to connect across space and time. 

Around the time of that party at Don’s studio, we were beginning to assemble the meat and potatoes of Bernal Cutlery, sharpening knives and selling vintage finds on eBay from the flea market. It was a way for us to get by, but it was also incredibly compelling and almost addicting. During these early days, tracing the origins and stories of knives became an activity that took the edge off the stress of early sobriety as under-resourced parents. Josh and I realized pretty quickly that we could sell knives for more when we had their origin story.

As Bernal Cutlery grew up with Josh, me, our three kids, and later on, our core staff, we stayed sober one day at a time. We folded in the things we loved and found that when we did that, the gravity it produced levied many iterations of what you see today. overcoming a serious addiction that almost killed us and recovering from the aftermath of what it did to not only us but also our friends and family colored life for us in a particular way that greatly influenced how all aspects of Bernal Cutlery ran and evolved. Our days in recovery are never lost on us, even after all these years; it truly impresses itself on our perspective on almost everything with gratitude. That’s our treasure and compass. To keep our sobriety, we must both help others and work towards a healthy life; but more importantly, as I heard many times in my recovery community from those who went before me, “we can, and we must insist on enjoying life’.

In the past, it seemed protective to keep this part of the shop’s origin story private, but more and more, it feels important to be honest and personal. Our story is a  San Francisco story, and currently, San Francisco, along with the rest of the country, is  experiencing an epidemic with addiction where, in 2020, more people died of drug overdoses than Covid 19, and our local addiction issues are fodder for the national ‘culture wars.’ It seems more than ever relevant to share our story honestly because you never know who it will help. Representation matters, and even though there are many ways to recover, not one right way, we find it necessary today to share that we have had continuous sobriety for over 20 years and have many people, places, and even policies to thank. I would go so far as to say that we recovered because of San Francisco. For my 20th sober anniversary last year, I wrote this: 

What I want people to know is that I didn't get here alone. There were clinics like Tom Wadell and staff that worked at the Department of Public Health, and then people that gave me chances, loans to get groceries, needle exchanges, and so many sober folks showing up to get coffee, take me to meetings, and answer my calls when I felt like I might relapse. Many people, places, and institutions helped me. I had what clinicians and academics call epistemic and hermeneutic justice, community-based and community-led support; I did it with individuals who have also walked the road to recovery. It is the least I can do, but it is also an honor and privilege not to take any of this for granted and to give back in any way that I can. I thank my sober community, and I thank San Francisco and the public health workers and advocates for 20 years today; a miracle when I couldn't get a single 24-hours

Being more public about the recovery side of our story runs risks, including the risk of playing into the neoliberal narrative about “folks that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.”  I hope that, instead, people might find hope or simply see where we came from and understand that we’re here, we’re not alone, and we didn't do it alone. San Francisco has an immensely large and vibrant recovery community; we are everywhere and likely outnumber those suffering on the streets, even in today's crisis. I feel compelled to share our story to pay respect to those who will not make it through the night and those who have lost loved ones. I am here to remember them and to say that we do recover, that it’s possible. 

Don’t Blow Your Checkers

Twin Steel Cities

Earlier this year, Josh and I decided we were ready to tell a larger knife story, starting with vintage knives. We also wanted to start making knives, and in some ways, acquiring Don’s collection compelled us to tell both what we had learned over the years about knife and food history and to learn more. We thought the best way to do all of this was to visit traditional knife-making regions, and if all went well, the feather in our cap at the end of the year would be our first Bernal Cutlery knife and the beginnings of a second book. We started working with a machinist and knife maker, Elias Sideris, earlier this year and then traveled with him and various folks from our crew this summer. Josh and some of our crew have known Eli going back to our Bernal Heights Days and have always thought him to be, at the very least our type of weirdo knife history people. I noticed that he smells knives, too. We’re really happy to be working with him.

Our European retail collection has been inspired by the vintage and antique knives that passed through our hands over the years. Often, in our sleuthing to find an ID of a vintage or antique knife, we would learn that a knife we were trying to identify was either still in production or the manufacturer was still in operation. So far, these regions include Solsano, Spain; Thiers, France; Solingen, Germany; Sheffield, England; and Holmdal, Norway. We’re also ready for more.

The first stop was to the UK to visit Sheffield, one of the most important areas for knife-making and steel production history. We also sell knives from a knife-making cooperative in London called Blenheim Forge, so it was also nice to visit them and see what they were doing in person. Some of our research questions involved tracing the roots of knife-making by finding the living history still present in areas from the Industrial Revolution and known as ground zero for the Industrial Revolution. Sheffield has proved itself to be a fantastic research town for cutlery workshops and steel production history. In contrast, its industrial output as a center of steel manufacture and huge volume of knives is largely gone; there are still some gems left that we retail and plenty of remanences to research. These include John Nowell, A Wright and Son Earnest Wright, William Wright, J Adams, Joseph Rogers, and George Wostenholm. While Sheffield is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the past, it has come out of some seriously rough times after mass mill closures with some old craftspeople and workshops alive and kicking. While some of the old industrial infrastructure has been repurposed for the University of Sheffield and student housing, plenty of people are still dedicated to preserving the skills and documenting the rich history. 

Food history has always fascinated me, and I generally find myself always looking for the food story behind everything. Food has the capacity and elasticity to be uniquely honest and multifaceted in it’s storytelling.  For this project, we are focusing on cutlery-related, whether directly related to the tool at hand and how it was used or the food stories surrounding the manufacturing history and the people related to the cutlery and steel production.

Three main historical events occurred from the mid to late 18th century to the late 19th century: The French, Industrial, and the British Agricultural Revolutions. These major events completely transformed Europe and created the first working class in Sheffield, England, and eventually Europe. Steel production and innovation were the cornerstones of Sheffield's rise and identity. In preparing for the travel we did this summer, I found a few neat surprises regarding the relationship between the agricultural revolution, beef, and the new working class of Sheffield. The English gave the French their national dish,  the beefsteak, during the occupation by The English after the Battle of Waterloo. Later, Yorkshire’s Robert Bakewell revolutionized livestock husbandry and helped feed the new working class in Sheffield. France and England, while in tandem keeping up with the demand of cutlery, knives, and steel refinement, France lagged behind Sheffield in its recovery from the revolution. It was forced to import talent, such as metallurgists from Germany and Northern Europe to keep up. I’m currently digging into the food exchanges and how these things shaped the types of knives and cutlery being made during this time. 

Because our goal was to research and write the food history that coalesced with knife manufacturing, its workers, and its overall history, while researching Sheffield, I found many parallels to my hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. I couldn't stop thinking about it and my eastern European ancestors who worked in the steel mills. Pittsburgh is the American twin city of Sheffield for steel making. It was a fresh perspective on my place of origin and its culture, growing up around its people, which are my people. 

Imagining people's lives in these workshops is a tall drink of water, and it reminded me of a book my dad gave me a few years back, Thomas Bell’s, “Out of this Furnace,”. It’s a novel written and published in 1941 detailing the lives of Eastern European workers in Pittsburgh’s mills. I re-read it alongside. E.P. Thompson’s book, “The Making of the English Working Class,” Bell chronicles the working conditions,  lives, and hardships of a few Eastern European families who worked the Steel Mills in Pittsburgh during the 19th and early 20th  centuries. Thomson’s book is an academic work focusing on Sheffield, offering a larger picture, including the complex but quantifiable data citing the terrible effects of working in mills, knife factories, and other manufacturing. For example, in his chapter on Standards and Experiences, he cites Sheffeild’s child mortality rates during the 19th century, “ This heavy child mortality among the children of workers who are often cited as beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution may be attributed in part to the general environmental health conditions. It may also have been due to the characteristic deformation and narrowing of the pelvic bones in girls who had worked since childhood in the mills, which made for difficult births:  the weakness of infants born to mothers who worked until the last week of pregnancy: but above all to the lack of proper child care.”(E.P Thomson 327-328). Although I have grown up with a sobering understanding of how the mill working side of my family suffered with the effects of living a working-class life with intergenerational trauma passed along, taking the form of mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and, unfortunately, multiple suicides witnessed even in my lifetime, I appreciated what studying Sheffleid has done to help me understand where I come from and where I am now. 

I’m a fresh-faced 50-year-old, and I’ve been through younger years of hiding and being embarrassed by where I came from; later years, I found I deeply missed where I came from and the people I belong to, and now finding pride in my lineage and the gifts that come with it. This research is giving me the answer to why I am drawn to history and storytelling. Turning 50 this year, I asked, ‘Who were my ancestors, and what are they telling me’? 

Growing up, I got the watered-down Pittsburgh history meant for grade school. The names synonymous with the vast wealth generated at the mills dotting the libraries, museums, and city streets are juxtaposed with Pittsburgh's history. These places named for the gracious industrialists were the scene for the mass layoffs I witnessed as a young child in the early 1980s. Before steel production moved overseas and the mills along the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers were still loud and always at least a little smokey, I was the only first grader with teenage parents and a pink free lunch card. Every kid was sporting that self-conscious pink flash the following year at the lunch line. But then, later that year with more potency, one of my classmates lost their mill worker dad to suicide. 

Researching Sheffield’s parallel history has been useful, giving me more color and context to the history of the working-class industrial areas of America where my origin story begins. Maybe part of the exercise of conjuring up a story from an anonymous old object by smelling it is trying to connect to those who went before me by using a relic to place myself on the exact coordinates of a timeline and what brought me to it. My experience taught me that origin stories change over time, and the further you get from a time and place, the more facets and nuances shape the story. And then, if we don't tell the stories, they will be lost. 

A few years ago, I took Josh and my kids to Pittsburgh.  We took a day and toured The Strip District, a neighborhood running down the Allegheny River bank that was once part of that loud, smokey industrial landscape of my childhood. I remember getting a birdseye view of these areas going over the Pittsburgh bridges as a child, especially with my steelworker grandfather in the white and gold Lincoln Continental that he was so proud of. Shopping, art galleries, and parks have replaced the industrial clamor. When I was 24, I drove over the Homestead Bridge for the first time in many years, and miles of mill infrastructure was leveled. I also remembered thinking while driving across the bridge that it smelled different like someone took a giant eraser and rubbed out the cityscape from the bridge.

The steel mill workers were on my dad’s side: union card carriers of the United States Steel Workers Union, a union created after the Homestead Uprising, a major win in the battle for labor rights in America.  Eastern European immigrant communities were one of the largest labor pools for steel. For most of the mill’s lifetime, It was a deadly and dangerous period in labor history in America. Recently, my pops told me the story of the first day of his job as a junior in high school with a kid on the way (me). He wasn’t there long and joined the Navy soon after, breaking the generational steel worker family line. He describes his job by what he had to wear. According to him, the phrase “Don’t blow your checkers” came from workers throwing up due to the difficult environmental conditions. This is from my pops:

When I was only 17, my father and grandfather worked for US Steel in the mill. They both helped me to get a job there even though I had to be 18. I went to high school during the day, and I worked the 4 o’clock to midnight shift. On my first day on the job, I was told to show up wearing long underwear, denim pants, and a flannel shirt, and it wasn’t winter. When I arrived at work, they gave me a special suit that was made out of denim and asbestos woven together; after I put that on over the street clothes, they then gave me an aluminum suit to put over the top. This came with asbestos gloves that went up to my elbow and were covered with aluminum. And finally, for my head,  an asbestos aluminum hood with welder’s glass that I can see through. The ovens where they make the steel are lined with fire brick, and the tunnels leading to the smokestacks have to be removed and replaced after 11 batches of steel have been made. They only let the furnace cool down for an eight-hour shift before the process starts. The fire brick is still glowing red hot.  After dressing, they tied a rope around my waist, gave me a bucket and a pickax, hosed me down with a fire hose, and then sent me into the furnace to start to chip away and remove the fire brick. it was like stepping into hell. The process was 10 minutes in, and then soon as I came out, they hosed me down again 10 minutes out 10 minutes in, 10 minutes out for an eight-hour shift with 30 minutes for a lunch break. I did this for the rest of my junior year and senior year. 

Growing up in Pittsburgh, all of my most profound core memories at my Pap-Pap Kozak’s house were wrapped with the smell of one dish that was a standing pot on the stovetop from morning to evening and would accompany all the meals throughout the day. It was a pot of stewed cabbage, kraut, and tomatoes. During hunting season, some deer meat might be thrown in, although there was often a separate deer meat stew. Pap- Pap Kozak, my dad’s dad, was a single dad and a mill worker with a second job working security at the local mall for most of my childhood.  He had one main kitchen in his house, rarely used, and two extra makeshift kitchens: one outdoor and both built off the garage for cooking and general food processing, like canning and freezing and hang-breaking game meat. It was almost like he was full-time camping but in his house. A second-story third kitchen came with the house, but he never used it; in fact, the family always ate and hung out in the garage and basement. I’m not sure why. In graduate school for Food Studies, I read an academic paper on the phenomenon of Italian immigrants and basement kitchens. My best guess for why these kitchen spaces existed on the East Coast was more for the practicality of food processing and maybe a side business for extra cash for women selling food out of their houses to workers. My Pap-Pap also had a vegetable garden, and I remember him bragging about his zucchini bread and bell pepper harvest. He died in 2010, a retired US Steel Union member. He worked hard and cared for his family, and I benefited greatly from his contributions and foodways. 

One dish I grew up with, Halushky, was introduced to Pittsburgh in many variations through the mill working eastern European communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries; eventually made such a large imprint on Pittsburgh writ large that Halusky is now a Pittsburgh regional dish that can be ordered in restaurants and pubs city-wide. Halusky began as a Slovakian dish, a gnocchi-type dumpling served with bryndza sheep's cheese; however, its contemporary iteration consists of egg noodles sauteed with cabbage, onions, butter, and cottage cheese. 

Here is my very San Francisco adaptation of my pap-pap Kozak’s Halushky recipe, not the egg noodles, but with the traditional potato dumpling, which I believe was a version of a Western Ukraine style. He taught me this dish when I was 10. 

This is one of those dishes that needs to be taught to someone by showing them, but here’s a try. 

Kelly’s Pittsburgh in  San Francisco Halushky 

Supplies

4 each Russet and Yellow Potatoes  

2 eggs whisked 

Salt 

2 yellow onions,

A shit- ton of smoked paprika to taste

1 teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda

2- 3 cups of flour (a little more or less, depending on the consistency)

For the Dumplings:

Grate the potatoes on the fine side of the grater. By hand is better, believe it or not. Place a clean dish towel over the grated potatoes and lean over a sink to squeeze out the excess water Mix dry ingredients Add to the potatoes the whisked eggs and then the dry ingredients. You should work towards a wet batter, not a doughy batter.

Set a large pot of water on the stove and set to high heat until the water boils; salt the water.  Take a large dinner plate or cutting board and fill the plate or board with batter. You won’t be able to fit all of the batter at once. With the back of a wooden spoon, push off tablespoon-sized portions of the batter off the plate or board and into the boiling water. When all the batter is gone from the plate, gently stir the dumplings with a slotted spoon. 

Once the dumplings float, cook for 4 minutes before taking them out to drain. Once cooked, remove your dumplings with the slotted spoon into a large bowl or colander with a tea towel underneath. Continue until you have no more batter left.  

Once all your dumplings are cooked, place about four tablespoons of salted butter in a large pan and sautee two moon-shaped sliced onions. Cook on medium-low heat until onions are soft and lightly browned. Take the butter and onions off the heat and add the Halusky. Stir until dumplings are completely coated with the butter and warmed through. I serve with a sauteed mixture of cabbage, red onion, and collards. In the fall, I add a sauteed green apple or two.  Serve the halusky over the cabbage mixture and top it off with cottage cheese a lot of black pepper and smoked paprika. 

Josh’s Anarchist Pie

In Honor of Don Rich I’m including our family recipe for anarchist pie our family makes every year on the 4th of July. In case you missed Josh’s substack on his passing and us acquiring his knife collection, he talked about how Don, his wife, and his daughter would make hundreds of pies once a year to give away to all his friends and neighbors for Thanksgiving. 

To make a blackberry pie, you will need two rolled pie crusts. If you buy them at a store, get one box of refrigerated pie crusts. If you are making them from scratch, use a recipe for a "double crust."

You will need a total of 6 cups of fresh blackberries. If you are foraging, soak them in a vinegar bath and wash them. Additionally, you will need 1 cup of granulated sugar, 1/4 cup of cornstarch, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and the juice of 1/2 of a fresh lemon.

To start, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Place a pie crust in the bottom of a standard pie pan. In a bowl, mix the blackberries, sugar, cornstarch, salt, and lemon juice, and then pour them into the crust.

Next, roll out the second crust and place it on top of the blackberry mixture. Mark the top with any design you like. Brush a light coating of egg wash over the crust with a pastry brush or the back of a spoon. Cut away any long strips of pie crust, crimp the edges, or press around the edge with a fork to seal the crusts together. Dot with butter and sprinkle with one tablespoon of sugar before baking.

Finally, place the pie on a rimmed cookie sheet to catch any spillovers and bake it for 50-55 minutes until golden and bubbly. If your crust gets too brown, cover it with aluminum foil while it bakes.

photo byLisa Weiss

The idea to do a second book has been simmering for years, but that pot was set to a boil with the chance acquisition of a lifetime’s worth of collection from local sculptor and culinary knife collector Don Rich who passed away last year. He had a bronze foundry in Oakland where he did his own bronze sculpture and commissions and had a New Year’s Day party with an obscene amount of pies made ahead of time for his friends. Still documented on his website here.

I met Don over musty boxes of knives in the flashlight-lit pre-dawn hours of Bay Area flea markets. Our initial begrudging acknowledgment of each other through the lens of flea market etiquette (don’t dart your hands into this box of old knives until I’m done looking, please) morphed into a friendly rivalry that led to geeking out about knife history and trading old knives with each other. Don’s once omnivorous collection had begun to become more specific to several makers, and as I would find them, we would trade for the ones that had become ancillary to Don’s focus. 

Don collected a lot of carving sets and tableware, among the chef knives, butcher knives, and other miscellany. The carving sets and some tableware had gone out of fashion as people’s lives and attitudes towards formal meals had changed a lot in the 75, 100 or 175 years ago when these were made. Old things carry a story and especially so culinary knives and tableware; it’s essentially impossible to tease out the stories of how these ended up separated from their previous owners, but it’s hard not to imagine the stories ranging everywhere from family drama and estrangements to the benign neglect of simply not appreciating old stuff. 

Many of the pieces show a good amount of wear, which can sometimes hint at the personalities of the old owners. Old tableware in particular, from those with slender means, bears the wear of their owner’s eating style and carry a particular feeling. Is it possible for a fork to be haunted? From carving sets and tableware to common household kitchen knives to finer professional quality knives, they all bore witness to an often lost and sometimes very familiar world of food that they are the markers of. 

Rather than parcel them all off right away (even though there are some I would be excited to add to the shop), I felt that this collection helped define a story that I had been finding about the story that knives tell, both from an individual level to the much larger socio-political one.

Don focused his collection of knives on the J. Russell Green River Works of Greenfield and Turners Falls, Massachusetts, A. J. Jordan from Sheffield, England, and Will & Finck and Michael Price from 19th century San Francisco. A through line of these makers (aside from being nearly 3000 miles apart from each other respectively) is the Industrial Revolution’s reverberations from its epicenter in the UK through its evolution in New England out to the then-new city of San Francisco. I’ll get into these makers more in the future as their stories link up excitingly here but here’s a quick introduction on the three. 

The Don Rich Collection and His Writing

I am immensely grateful to have been contacted by Don’s family about his knives and hope he’d be happy about that too. Hopefully, I can help organize some of what he was putting together in his collection and hopefully pick up some bits of information that I wasn’t able to get from him during our knife trades or during slow moments at the flea market when we would show each other our day's finds. Don had done some writing about steel that is pretty interesting and that I will share in later installments that link up with some other elements of the story. 

For those interested in Don, here’s his website. You’ll be able to guess that it is not current, but there’s more information about him and his work there, so, check it out.

Stay tuned for more entries to our Substack newsletter. Kelly and I will talk about our new and old projects, reflect on running a knife shop, and discuss the behind-the-scenes. We also have some big announcements coming soon, including a new book project we’re working on (no title yet). We’ll also be sharing our recent and upcoming knife and food travels here.

Will & Finck + Michael Price (SAN FRANCISCO)

Will & Finck and Michael Price were both post-gold rush San Francisco knife makers who made many items. Before the transcontinental railroad came out west, all sorts of goods had to come via boat around South America or made in California. The local pride in the goods made in San Francisco was high, and these two knifemaking works were definitely warranted. Despite being of a very high quality, these San Francisco-made knives were made in a unique style that, once discovered by the larger outfits back east, became quickly imitated, granted at a different level of quality. The fighting knives from these makers have long commanded huge prices, but the culinary knives, primarily carving sets, are typically very affordable and might wash up on the island of lost knives here in the Bay Area and beyond.

A.J. Jordan

A. J. Jordan, interestingly, was an American who moved to Sheffield to set up a business making unique culinary knives at a time when Sheffield’s reach into the American cutlery market had taken a bit of a nosedive post US civil war. While still one of the world’s most important cutlery manufacturing centers Sheffield had been broadsided in the US by strict tariffs and the growth of the American cutlery industry that was more eager to include mechanized techniques to improve output. A.J. Jordan leaned on Sheffield’s highly skilled hand-made cutlery techniques utilizing some of Sheffield’s best knife-making steel; double-shear steel with a handle of ultra-durable Persian boxwood to make very unique and super high-quality knives for professional chefs and butchers. These knives presage a lot of current knife making sensibilities, thin blades, and ergonomic handles. Weird shapes. A J Jordan also resold a lot of other Sheffield-made knives with his brand on them (not made with Persian boxwood and double-shear steel), but the ones made by the A J Jordan company are really phenomenal. 

J. Russell Green River Works

J. Russell held a special interest for Don; it’s hard not to appreciate their knives if you are into finding old cutlery, the width and breadth of what they made in the 19th century is quite large, but I suspect there were larger motifs that caught his attention. J. Russell Green River Works is arguably the first American cutlery operation formed in the nascent economic and material independence from Great Britain. Their story outlines the birth of American industry in New England and summarizes many of the important facets of 19th-century American history, warts and all.

Subscribe now