thecounterintuitivekitchen

Sometimes the “s” that makes things plural is a lie, depending on your expectations. For example, here I can offer information on only one knife skill, and it’s… not really about cutting or chopping. Here it is! The helping hand should be in bear claw position.

The helping hand holds the onion or the jicama or the carrot. “Bear claw” here just means “tuck your fingertips in and under a bit” so the knife blade might graze your knuckles but not cut off your fingertips because you have draped your hand over the food item like it’s a fainting couch. It would make more sense to me to call it monkey fist or brass knuckles, because bear claw suggests you have long, tough claws that you can use to rip open salmon or that your hand is a soft pastry. (I suppose the latter is sort of true. )

^{The brass knuckles might help you get your hand in the right position (and is made by “Knife Maker Gillian at gillianknives.com which is sadly not me) . The monkey fist knot vibrates with the unspoken reminder to tuck your fingers, and the “monkey drunken kung fu” fist is sort of the right position, plus helpful for self-defense.}

So this is the one thing I know, and yet I still managed to lop off four fingernails while cooking during the month of December.

The first fingernail went when I was chopping onions with our old, dull chef’s knife. You have to use more force with dull knives, and it slipped, and my pointer finger lost a chunk of fingernail and our dinner lost the onion that was going in it. The second chunk of fingernail, on the middle finger of my helping hand, I sheared off when my dog put her nose firmly into my butt and I shrieked and lost control of a carrot. I was slicing a tomato with the wrong (non-serrated) knife when it slipped and I crushed/cut/flayed my pinky finger and created a revolting diagonal pinky fingernail that still hurts, nearly a month later. I had failed to properly mop up lemon juice from squeezing a million lemons for lemon curd when, while slicing the last lemon in two, I slipped on the floor and managed to lop off a large hunk of thumbnail. It was all so disgusting. Seeing your fingernail in a pile of chopped vegetables or fruit is like finding a vertebra in your pudding cup or a toilet brush in your pillowcase. Every time I cut off a fingernail I flashed to the scene in Airplane! where the passenger produces eggs from her mouth, and then Leslie Nielsen cracks one and a bird flies out.

Too late, I decided to do two things: address our dull knife situation and then read up on knife skills, plural. I bought a Milk Street Nakiri knife because Instagram heard my screams and commanded my feed to show me the knife 100 times a day. It is sharp and pretty great. Then I floated around the internet, reading advice.

Did you know that you are supposed to choke up on a chef’s knife so your thumb and forefinger are on the blade next to the shaft? I did not. It seems like an aggressive Eastern European made that rule, somehow. Like, here is how we strangle this knife to death while slicing off some sausage bits and drinking bulls blood wine in lovely cool wine caves because we have muscle memory of being invaded by the Mongol Empire. It’s called the Pinch Grip, apparently. If you just hold the handle, that’s the Handle Grip, ie. the Basic Bitch Grip, whereas if you put your forefinger on top of the blade, that is the Super Dumb Basic Bitch Who Gets Carpal Tunnel Grip but is acceptable if you are Hiroyuki Terada or Gordon Ramsey cutting an onion.

When I actually was paid to be a cook, which is… hard to believe, but it’s the truth, I was paid to be a cook, in actual US currency, someone who worked at the restaurant told me how to hold things so I wouldn’t chop my fingers off. When I asked the head chef/owner to walk me through herbs and seasonings and when to use what, she sighed loudly, grabbed me by the shirt sleeve, pointed at each huge container located inconveniently above the dishwashing sink, and angrily rattled off things like “this deepens, this heightens, this lightens, this sharpens” at the speed of post-advertisement disclaimers or cattle auctioneering. And she was the one who hired me, even after I told her I had no relevant experience. She later admitted she hired me because she liked the hat I was wearing at the time, and she thought I could hang because I was growing my hair out of a super short pixie and had braided it to hide it, but the braids poked out of the hat… Imagine Chris Kirkpatrick of NSYNC but female and ashamed.  

Also, at that same restaurant, one afternoon between the lunch and dinner service, another cook heard me slicing mushrooms and stormed into the kitchen demanding to know why I was cutting them at such slow speed, at which point I told him to fuck right off and then I left for half an hour and got an ice cream. (We had the kind of relationship that allowed me to tell him to fuck off regularly, with no residual hurt feelings, which is what I imagine all teenage boy friendships used to be like, before social emotional learning curricula.) But just imagine being someone who listens for the sound of mushrooms being sliced and then comes raging in to yell about the tempo. It’s not exactly a noisy process. It also means you take cooking seriously and consider improvement possible, but I was not serious, and not aiming to be a professional cook. I was just trying to get through the summer without dying in that family-run restaurant where everyone screamed at each other and threw hot pans mid-meal service and broke glasses in various rages. Once, the other cooks dropped a fish filet prepared for the owner’s mother on the greasy anti-fatigue mat we all stood on, pushed the fish through the mat’s holes, reshaped it, covered it with mornay sauce*, and served it to her. 

That experience has something to do with me always wanting to cook alone, unwatched and unattended, even if it means no one is there to say “hey, you are about to cut off another part of your finger.” Having someone hang around in the kitchen talking to me or, God forbid, asking how they can help while I’m cooking is torture. I hate it because I don’t know what I am doing and am always flying by the seat of my pants. How do you get assistance with that? You can’t, unless ¹you make the other person take over, and thus I hate it. I hate it more than I hate most things domestic. In December, I did a lot of necessary cooking and unnecessary baking and canning. December is a month of assaultive celebrations in my household. Everyone gets overwhelmed. I got overwhelmed. Now I have four deformed fingertips and, as of today, a palm that looks like I mistook it for the throat of my enemy and tried to slash it, because I was cleaning the only other sharp knife in the house, a huge serrated knife, started to drop it and instinctively tried to catch it without realizing that dropping a knife in the sink will not hurt the knife, but trying to shake hands with said knife will fuck you up. Technically, that is knife skill number two, validating the title:

1. My friend who worked with me (as an actual cook, not a pretend cook, which I was) at the family-run restaurant contacted me to let me know that the fish that was pushed through the greasy mat was salmon, and it was not mornay sauce but “Isabella sauce.” ↩︎