Life, in Particular

Silence of the pigs

By Kevin Steel ⋅ February 23, 2003 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Yesterday I drove my father to a kitchen supply/health food store on Edmonton’s southside so he could buy 50 pounds of organic oats, the same of organic wheat, and 20 pounds of flax. My parents, now retired, like to mill their own flour… in their condo. Yes, folks, retirement certainly looks like a weird time.

So while Pops was yakking to a saleswoman about grains (thank heavens he didn’t start talking about his bowels) I wandered off into gadget heaven. At first I made a beeline for the gargantuan cast iron frying pan. Okay, I have a thing for cast iron frying pans, cast iron anything for that matter. Maybe it’s a macho thing; maybe I don’t feel like a sissy if what I’m cooking with can stop a bullet. Yeah, like that dork from the sitcom “Home Improvement.” Take your Tefal and go cook at home, pretty boy. Lookin’ fer yer melon baller, pretty boy? Can’t bite a melon?

Okay. Moving away from the cast iron then.

All through my adult life, in various stages of culinary frenzy, I swore that I would buy myself a good kitchen knife. It’s no big deal obviously, since 20 years have gone by and I haven’t been able to sustain the thought long enough to actually go out and do it. Let’s not even begin to discuss how long it took me to remember to buy a decent can opener.

But here I was, facing a whole wall of Henckel knives, the full range, the entire line. A kindly saleslady approached me. She appeared to be in her early fifties, slim, with a beauty salon ‘doo from the ’60s. She wore an apron with the store’s logo on it.

“Can I help you?”

So I blubbered out my story about always wanting to buy one good knife, 20 years, blah blah. She smiled. I could tell by her eyes that this happens a lot.

“Okay!” she said brightly and started explaining the various levels of the product line, smoothly, slowly. She talked of balance, she talked of paring and peeling. “Balance is not particularly important if you are buying a larger knife because you’ll tend not to use it for long periods. But if you’re peeling a whole basket of apples and you’ve got that thing in your hand all day, then you’ll want something that won’t tire you out.”

This was a nice touch. Now, I’ve got to say that I myself would never peel an entire basket of apples. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve peeled more than a dozen in my life. Same thing with potatoes. A beautiful woman once told me that all the nutrients are “in the skin” and that was a good enough reason for me to leave the tedious enterprise of peeling everything except bananas in the capable hands of others.

Still, for a brief second, in the here and now of a northern February, with over two feet of snow on the ground outside, I imagined myself in an sunny orchard under a tree of blossoms, sitting beside a canish basket of ruddy red MacIntoshes, peeling to my heart’s content–”Tweet-tweet” sang an imaginary bird (an idiotic image to be sure because the blossoms and the fruit were seasonally out of synch).

“But I assume you’ll want one of these,” said my knife guide back on earth, “which come in various sizes.” She reached out and handed me the murder weapon from John Carpenter’s Halloween. “That’s a ten-inch. This moulding here on the stem is actually new for the company. How does that feel?”

Then something unusual happened. As I held and admired this “Key to the City of Good Living,” the saleslady grabbed the 12-inch Henckel, an almost absurdly huge thing (even though it was only two-inches longer than the one I had) like she had reached into another dimension–for instance Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town–and pulled it out. She held it up and said, not really to me, but to the wall, to the past, her personal past in fact, “You know? My old dad would have dearly loved to have had one of these in the barn when he was slaughtering pigs.” She then turned the knife over. “I can still see those pig heads in the basement over night.”

There was a bit of pause.

Finally, I offered, “A real horror show?”

The saleslady looked at me and smiled. “Oh yeah, sure. But they made great head cheese.”

There was nothing else to say. We walked together toward the cash register with a Five Star $150 ten-inch slicing knife.

It’s a thing of beauty. I’m holding it in my hand now, typing with the other. Cuts everything like ‘buttah.’ Sometimes you just know when to buy. As Bart Simpson put it, “Once again, a knife wielding maniac has shown us the way.” Perhaps I’ll start shaving with it. Perhaps in the years ahead, after I retire, I’ll take up slaughtering my own livestock in the apartment.