WHEN Anthony Bourdain, the chef, gonzo food writer and TV food show star, was visiting India, I gave him my copy of his bestselling Kitchen Confidential to sign. The book’s cover shows a young Bourdain with an impossibly long chef’s knife in his apron, it has a long section that talks lovingly about chef’s knives and many stories involving near criminal use of these knives. So I wasn’t too surprised when he drew a picture of a chef’s knife in my book and wrote below with a flourish: ‘Cook’s Rule!’
At that point I was glad that Bourdain would never see me cook. Because while I have many knives, of different sizes, shapes and functions, when I actually cook, my hand automatically reaches for a really basic small knife with a serrated edge and red plastic handle that I bought ages back in a 3 for Rs100/- deal in Bandra market. The other two are long lost, but this one is still there and as useful as ever when I’m cooking Indian food.
I doubt I’m alone in this. When I snoop in other people’s kitchens I usually notice that the knives that show most use are very basic, cheap knives. Streetfood vendors dice mountains of onions and cut the thinnest flakes of potato with ‘blade knives’, just strips of metal with a razor edge and a hole to hang them from. I know top chefs who pride themselves on their expensive imported knives, but I suspect the cooks who do most of the actual knifework in their kitchens use only basic Indian knives.
Indian cookbooks are also curiously uninterested in knives. Where utensils are discussed (something not enough do), they talk about karhais, tavas, handis, but hardly about knives. Dadimano Varso, the fabulous Palanpuri Jain cookbook has a two page spread with line drawings (much more useful than photos) of 92 different kitchen utensils, including really recondite ones. But there are only three small knives grouped under the general term chhari. One of the few who mentions knives is, significantly, a French chef, Leon Petit, who worked in Calcutta in the ‘50s and wrote a cookbook where he notes: "Chopping knives are known as Koitha. Other knives are called Chari." And that’s it.
This is a far cry from the fetishisation of knives in foreign cooking – not just Western, but Chinese, whose chefs are rarely shown without their trademark cleavers, and above all Japanese, where knife making is a revered art. Yet Indian cooks seem to care little about them, other than occasionally sending them for sharpening to those guys who travel around with pedal operated whetstones.
Foreign chefs might be contemptuous of this, but the fact is that Indian cooks don’t bother with special knives because Indian food rarely requires special knifework. The grains and pulses we cook don’t need knives (but do need slow cooking and stirring, which is why the shape of pots matters and the kitchen goddess Annapurna holds a ladle in her hand). Vegetables are easily peeled and chopped with small knives, and we also have many tools for peeling, grating and cutting dough, doing knife like functions without exactly being knives.
Some special knives do exist, mostly for meat. There are the choppers used in tandem for mincing meat (producing a subtly different texture from mincing machines). Fisherwomen use flat knives with an upturned end for yanking out fish guts, or opening coconuts. The Ministry of Agriculture’s website lists several types of kitchen knives, mainly from the very non-vegetarian North-East, which often double up for agricultural use. They are mostly made from recycled leaf springs that are sharpened and given a neat design twist – two small arms that lift the blade edge off the ground to keep it sharp.
But the point about these knives is that they are mostly for professionals, like butchers or fishsellers. Our curries require small chunks that can easily be eaten by hand, and that chopping is done when the meat or fish is bought. This also means that Indian food is never carved at the table, which removes another reason why Western households keep special knives. Without familiar use knives then become dangerous and to be avoided, as with Gustad Noble in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, who dreads, on market visits, "the constant sinister flash or a meat cleaver or butcher’s knife which, more often than not, was brandished in the vendor’s wild hand as he bargained and gesticulated."
There is one very distinctive Indian cutting implement used in home kitchens – the stationary knife known as the bonti, addoli or other names. Chitrita Banerji’s essay on this is so good (collected in The Hour of the Goddess, and sporadically online) I can’t add anything to it, except to say that, useful as it is, I think it is dying out. It needs real skill and training to use it – sometimes at the fish market I go to the freshwater fish section, not to buy, but just to see the almost poetic grace with which the Bengali fishsellers cut up a big rohu on their extra large bontis.
Few of us get such training these days, nor do we work in the floor level kitchens that it is really meant for. Now that we stand perhaps some will take to large Western chef’s knives, but many, I suspect, will continue to use basic Indian ones to continue to chop out excellent Indian food.
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