Sharpening Skills
I recently read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn in preparation for this Saturday’s Bookmarks festival at Historic Bethabara Park..
The book is basically a memoir of Flinn’s stint at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.
It’s also a bit romance, travelogue, and if it were a film it might be dubbed a “chick flick,” in that Flinn’s female perspective pervades her writing.
Of course, it does have lots of food.
What I particularly got out of the book is a reminder of the true professional cook’s sense of exactitude, the attention to technique often the little details, that makes a difference.
One simple example is the chopping of an onion. Anybody can chop an onion. Not everyone can neatly chop an onion so that that all the pieces are of a uniform size that will cook evenly and spread evenly throughout a dish.
It’s just one of those little details that makes a difference in cooking.
Here’s Flinn’s description of her chef instructor demonstrating how to chop an onion during one of her first Cordon Bleu classes — what she calls turning “a simple task into a moment of beauty”:
“With a chef’s knife, he cuts a peeled onion in half at the root. He places one half cut-side down on the board and cuts thin vertical slices toward the root but not through it, keeping the onion intact, as if on a hinge. Twisting the blade flat, he cuts thin slices across, parallel to his cutting board, again stopping each slice before the root end. Then, he slices across the top of the onion down, and perfect tiny cubes tumble onto the cutting board.”
Flinn will demonstrate a couple of recipes as well as knife skills at 11:30 a.m. in the Food for Thought tent at Bookmarks.
I’ll be around at the festival, too. If you see me, stop and say hello.
