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Outrageous: How To Sharpen a Kitchen Knife

Outrageous. I am outraged by well-intended advice. Twice.

outrageous-lenticular-sunrise
Outrageous lenticular clouds over Mount Baker at sunrise.

Yesterday I read a well meaning but outrageous bit of advice on blogging: have a theme and stick to it. None of this some nostalgia, some book discussion, some social commentary stuff. Choose a theme and stick to it. Anyone who knows me well, knows I wander all over the map. I never stick to routines for long. If you are as old as I am, you might remember a plastic surgeon back in the 1960’s who claimed all you had to do was repeat something 20 times and it became a habit. What rot! If I do the same thing 20 times in a row, it’s time for a change.

Good advice, this sticking to theme. I’m sure many readers want blogs to be predictable, but for me, no thanks. I’m not following it. Can’t follow it. I can’t even stick to bad habits. Hence, this post.

This weekend, I read an item in the New York Times, Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores. Very sensible. Wash your sheets, throw out expired prescription opioids, unclog your sink. Yeah. Sure. Fine. I do these things whenever I am forced to. Who doesn’t?

One outrageous task sent me into low earth spitting orbit: sharpen your knives.

I know something about sharpening. I got my first jack knife from my grandpa when I six. And my first sharpening stone. The NYT article mentioned that a sharp knife is safer than a dull one. My left hand is covered with scars from dull knives that skipped off of the piece of wood I was whittling on and into my hand. These are old scars. I’ve learned to sharpen knives.

Dull knives are dangerous

The article starts with a modern nod to the counter-intuitive danger of dull knives. Good start, I said to myself, glancing at my scarred hand.

The rest was drivel

The rest of the item was drivel. It suggests sharpening knives once a year. Once a year? Piffle. Sharpen your knives the instant they loose their bite. It depends on the knife and how you use it.

How I do it

I sharpen my knives every time I use them, once or twice a day for my chef’s knife. Treat your knives with the care they deserve. Sharp edges are delicate and fragile. Don’t throw a good knife in the dishwasher to get rattled around, dented, and nicked.

After I use a knife, I clean it, and sharpen it on a steel, a dozen or more strokes on each side of the edge. Sharpening on a steel removes little or no material from the blade. Instead, it reshapes the metal into a sharp edge. A steel can’t get rid of a nick in an edge or remove a blunt spot, but it will return an undamaged edge to keen slicing form. The duller the edge, the less effective the steel.

You can’t reshape forever. Eventually, you have to grind the edge, which might amount to once a year, although once every few months is more realistic for knives you use daily.

You must be judicious in grinding, which removes metal from the edge. Grind too often and your knife disappears or morphs into an unusable shape. But if you don’t grind often enough, you have a dull and dangerous knife.

Trial and error

I won’t get into tools, angles, and techniques here. My best advice reflects my experience. Trial and error, grasshopper. Trial and error. There are many techniques and they all work, but not necessarily for you.

The blunter the angle of a blade, the less keen the edge, but the longer it stays sharp when cutting is tough. My perfect edge is not your perfect edge, but when an edge is not perfect, sharpen it. Use the steel often, a grinding stone only when needed. Power grinders are fast, but require expensive guides or great skill. Hard stainless steel blades are bears to sharpen, but stay sharp longer. Good carbon steel requires frequent maintenance, but with proper attention, it cuts like a dream. I have a cheap Chinese cleaver that looks like a mess, but cuts cleaner than its much more expensive German stainless brethren.

As an aside, most kitchens have too many knives. Learn to use and treat a few good knives well. Give an impoverished homicidal maniac a break and send the clutter to goodwill. Your life will be better. Ask Marie Kondo.

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The Dread Effanem Crusher: Pioneer Fashion Accessory

Ah, the Effanem (pronounced “F & M”) crusher. On the farms and hills of Whatcom County, baseball caps are de rigueur these days. Men, women, and children all wear them, but sixty years ago, county men and boys favored Effanem crushers, Maine hunting hats they are sometimes called, but I don’t see that Maine has any special claim to them.

Ball caps vs. the Effanem crusher

I used to wear a ball cap, but I’ve gone back to wearing an Effanem crusher most of the time. Rebecca, my wife, who I finagled into giving one to me for my birthday, doesn’t like it, and I imagine I get a few odd glances, but I don’t mind.

The Dread Effanem Crusher
The dread Effanem crusher hunting hat

To swing the deal, I had to compromise with Rebecca. The traditional color for a hunting hat is red. During the last flash of crusher popularity, blaze orange was common. The one I wear now is black, a compromise choice.

Red hats

The red hat was to ensure that hunters did not mistake your head for a deer, pheasant, or duck and blast away. Blaze orange was the same idea, raised a notch.

I was never much of a hunter, but I like a red hat. In the late 1960s, I hiked all over the North Cascades with my cousin Ed. He was a photographer and wannabe prospector who said mountain pictures always came out better when somebody wore red. I went along with him and wore a red hat.

In the 50s and 60s, you could buy a hunting hat at any sporting goods store in the county. I got my first from Ira Yeager’s store, which started in downtown Bellingham near the YMCA.

Angling for a crusher

Last fall, angling for a crusher as a birthday present from Rebecca, I checked out the availability at Yeager’s new store on the Northwest, which can’t have been located there much more than fifty years now. The girl in the clothing section was polite when I asked where I could find an Effanem crusher, but I could tell that she thought old geezers would be better off if they stayed home more.

Since this is 2020, I went online and found three sources for genuine Effanem crushers in red, blaze orange, hunter green, and black. One was a place in Maine that sells aged coyote urine with a Maine hunting hat sideline. I know Rebecca will never order anything from a place called Predator Pee Store, so I passed on it.

Johnson Woolen Mills sells the hats, but nobody owns up to manufacturing them. The obvious candidate, F & M Hat Co., looks genteel and probably shares Rebecca’s attitude toward the Predator Pee Store. Amazon sells them too. I took the easy way and put a red Effanem crusher on my Amazon wish list.

That’s how I got a black one.

Opening day

Now days, there’s not so much hunting in lowland Whatcom County. When I was a kid, the first day of hunting season was an occasion. Mom made me stay close to the yard and Dad avoided going into the woods more than he had to.

Dad always said the first couple days of hunting season were dangerous—early on, game was not as wary as they became after a few days of random gunfire. The easy hunting attracted less experienced and excitable hunters who didn’t know how to handle guns like the steady old hands. Getting a gun permit and hunting license sixty years ago was easier and cheaper than it is now. In the country, it seemed as if almost everyone had a gun of some sort around for shooting pests.

And, as I once overheard someone say, the first day of hunting season was as good a reason as any to get drunk. News of relatives and neighbors killed or wounded in hunting accidents was common.

Pothunters

You don’t hear the word pothunter often, but that is exactly what my grandparents and many of our neighbors were. They hunted for food, not sport. And they did not hunt like sportsmen, who, as their name implies, generally prefer to give game a sporting chance. To my practical grandpa, giving game any chance at all was a waste of time and ammunition.

According to my dad, Grandpa would watch deer carefully during the summer to get to know their habits and quirks, passing out samples from his garden to get them used to him. Toward fall, he would go out early in the morning, just before dawn, where he knew his nearly tame deer would pass, set out a spread of vegetable to get their attention, and wait. He had his rifle ready, a measly little twenty-two because the ammunition was cheap.

When a deer sampled the bait, he would shoot it in the head from close range with a single shot, no messing around. He could make one box of cartridges last several years. Dad said Grandpa took pride in quickly hanging and bleeding out the deer he shot to avoid the off taste of typical sportsman’s venison.

Dad also told me Grandpa didn’t pay much attention to hunting season. In those days, before my time, shooting a deer out of season for the smokehouse on your own farm was your business, nothing for the game warden or the sheriff to fret over. Whether it was the law or not, the season did not affect pothunters on their own land. You might as well try to tell them to thrash their grain or slaughter their hogs by the calendar instead of the weather. For a pioneer farmer, hunting season was nothing more than an annoyance that egged strangers on to trespass.

Times change

By the time I was around, that had all changed.

Throughout hunting season, we often heard shots in the distance and saw hunters wandering through the fields and woods. Today in pandemic 2020, we are in the midst of deer, upland game, and small game seasons. With the exception of regular booms from the trap shooters at the gun club down on the Larson Road, I have not heard shots or seen hunters this year.

I can’t say exactly when the hunters disappeared. I imagine there must still be a few around and there are deer all over, but with houses so close together now, shooting that was merely dangerous sixty years ago is now reckless.

The hunters I know today, cross the Cascades to eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond to hunt. They hunt to fill their freezers, but with the cost of travel and all, venison is an expensive cut of meat. And, if you ask me, some of these sportsmen could take a lesson in butchering from my grandpa.

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The Radicalization of America: Whatcom County

I read an article in the New York Times this evening “The Radicalization of a Small American Town.” Brian Groh, the author of the Times article, describes a microcosm of the radicalization of America, a small town in Indiana that has been devastated by the economy of the 21st century, wracked with pain and death of opioid addiction, crippled by the response to the covid-19 epidemic, and violently political.

Radicalization of America
Sunrise in Whatcom County

Instead of the friendliness, lack of pretension, and sense of decency Groh remembers from his youth, he recounts the story of a former neighbor who was recently threatened when he expressed a political opinion.

Groh laments the change.

Opioid crisis and the radicalization of America

It’s a good story, but I wonder if many of his neighbors would agree with his view. I looked at opioid death statistics in Indiana where statewide deaths per thousand are above the national average. The county in the article has one of the lowest rates in the state. We in Whatcom County are fortunate: although opioid and other drug deaths are still far too prevalent, some statistics show a slight decline in the opioid death rate in Whatcom County between 2002 and 2018.

We have a problem, but not a raging crisis. Thank heavens. Covid-19 is bad enough.

Rural Indiana

I’ve visited Mr. Groh’s rural Indiana. I’ve never lived there, but it felt like home as I listened to conversations among farmers at the tractor dealership where I was installing software. Both my Dutch and German ancestors spent a few decades in the Midwest before they made their final jump west to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In rural Indiana, I felt like I could have been in Lynden or Ferndale.

What’s changed?

Groh’s experience does not match my experience in Whatcom County. I agree that the rural America I see today is not the place I saw when I was growing up. But the question is what changed? Did Whatcom County change? Or did I?

Well. I changed. I know that. I went off to college and graduate school.

What I learned

There, calculus taught me that differentiation and integration are mathematically two aspects of the same operation. In chemistry and physics, I learned that science can measure and predict the changes around us with greater precision than muddled impressions of undisciplined observation, but it continually refines and deepens understanding rather than lays down immutable laws.

At the age of nineteen, a mathematical logic class forced me to plumb the mysteries of the proof of Gödel’s theorem, which asserts that no matter how much you know, there will always be things you can’t fully understand. By twenty-one, I had learned to read classical Chinese and was forced to notice that the Athens-Jerusalem axis of western civilization has not been the only foundation for successful societies.

Then I realized that a humble farm boy had best quit straining the seams of his underpants. I came back home to work that out, but I was no longer the kid I was growing up and already I saw Whatcom County through changed eyes. But I also realized that my eyes had become exotic. I fret over Gödel’s theorem. My neighbors don’t.

Fifty years later

Fifty years later, I’m still working on that project. I see that my neighbors and relatives have many virtues. They are tough, self-confident, often happy. Some are prosperous, some think the prosperity they deserve has been withheld by forces they should control but can’t. Some are accomplished, many are stylish. A significant number are convinced that they have right on their side. I’m still the lout with manure on my boots that I was fifty years ago.

My experience is in the software business, which is like most businesses, as far as I can tell. You don’t last long in the software if you can’t spot who is likely to get the work done and who is likely to screw things up. I learned to stay away from loudmouths who succeed by refusing to pay their help, stiff their creditors, shift blame, and counter reason with bluster. They may succeed for a while, but eventually business caves in around them and everyone loses. That’s about as far as my politics go.

Doubling down

I also know it is easier to double down on a bad choice than it is to switch to a better choice. Switching to a choice that you once rejected is a humiliating struggle. I’ve been wrong often enough to know the sick feeling and bad taste that fouls my gorge when I recognize a misjudgment. I’ve faced it often enough; I don’t wish it on anyone.

When a bad choice is not all bad, the struggle is more painful. If a segment of the population prospered for three years while others struggled, the segment that thrived will not readily give up their gains. They will be proud of their sagacity. Those who look up to prosperity often throw their lot in with the prosperous even though they have reaped few benefits. Humans are not good at balancing long and short-term gains.

2020 vs 1960

In pandemic 2020, everyone is overstressed and close to anger. Add an atmosphere that promotes strife and tension over calm, and you have a community inclined toward violence.

But is the Whatcom County community fundamentally different from the same place sixty years ago? I say no. It was not ideal then and it is not ideal now. McCarthyism was still a topic sixty years ago. Racism was casually accepted among my parents and grandparents. Abusing native Americans acceptable behavior. The Ku Klux Klan flourished for a while in Whatcom County. Dig into the local newspaper archives and you soon run into language and propositions that might make you flinch.

Given today’s conditions, I think the county of my youth would have been inclined toward violence, perhaps more so than today. Although gun enthusiasts are vocal and prominent today, guns and ammunition were more easily available fifty years ago. Most country people had weapons for dealing with varmints and were ready to use them. More so than I see today.

Racism was more overt, mistreating the tribes was usual.

But serious violence never erupted. That’s important. Today, folks rant about antifa and the far right. As a kid, I overheard talk about threats from Bolsheviks, Wobblies, Fascists, Communists, and so forth, but it all turned out to be nervous fretting.

Is Whatcom County radicalized?

I don’t think so. No more today than fifty years ago. What I do see today, like fifty years ago, is a huge and quiet majority of concerned good people who want to live their lives in peace with their neighbors.

That hasn’t changed at all.