Origin Stories

Three Vignettes

                                       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