I bought this knife when I was 20 or so, living with a group of women friends. My mother had a similar knife in her kitchen — of carbon steel (not stainless) with a wooden handle — so I felt deeply it was just one of those things every girl should have in her home. This was long before I actually took up cooking in any real way, which I didn’t do until I was around 40, my mother being, despite her wonderful knife, as ignorant of basic cooking principles as her own mother. Not to say she didn’t feed us well as I was growing up, we got good, well balanced meals. But, for whatever reasons, I didn’t learn much in the way of cooking skills from my mother, only a few family recipes.
I bought the knife for about $20 at a commercial kitchen supply store down on King Street East and was very pleased with my purchase, part of my coming to adulthood somehow. However over the coming decade or so I clearly didn’t take great care of it because about 15 years ago half the wooden handle fell off. Water must have constantly sat between the wood and the metal tang and eaten away at the rivets.
But even then, I couldn’t get rid of it. Being carbon steel it is easy to sharpen, and I learned to dry it thoroughly after washing. It endures. I reach for it for almost every food cutting task because the blade is fairly thin and it easily slices through vegetables or meat. A few years after half the handle fell apart I bought a replacement but when I got it home it was too big, and the blade too thick. I went back to my half-handle-less knife, it feels good in my hand, well balanced, comfortable. It’s one of my favourite things OOMFT.