Sheepsfoot Rediscovery

Early this year, Mario Cortez at the SF Chronicle sent the shop an email asking if we could shine any light on the popularity of sheepsfoot knives with chefs at restaurants here in the Bay Area. This email was forwarded to me, and I was initially a little flummoxed. Was I missing some new trend? Honestly, I thought possibly the Clydesdale hoof looking “Serbian chef knives” (not a traditional Serbian chef knife, but first made by Serbs apparently) might have jumped from the social media world to actual professional kitchens. I doubted it, as they are too heavy for actual professional kitchen work (I’m sure there are some using these things in professional kitchens, and if that's you and you are clutching your pearls in offence, a thousand pardons, but are you sure you want to use that thing?). For the uninitiated (those who haven’t wasted time on social media in the last five years), they can be seen there being used to dispatch suspiciously limp fish snatched from pristine mountain creek waters conveniently next to a blazing campfire, where they chop and slice with gusto. Luckily, I didn’t embarrass myself by asking if this was the knife in question and shut up, listening for another 2 minutes (not always my go-to) and found out Mario was referring to table knives with a sheep 's-foot blade made in France that are in use at several restaurants here in San Francisco. After more discussion, I realized that these were made by Roland Lannier, a knife maker in Thiers, France, who used to be the production manager at Percival, and is now running his own shop and specializing in sheepsfoot-bladed table and folding knives. A significant benefit of a sheepsfoot-shaped blade that Lannier points out is that when used as a table/steak knife, it dulls slowly in that the point hits the plate more than any other spot, sacrificing itself for the rest of the edge, which stays lively longer. Roland is absolutely correct, but definitely not the first to recognize and utilize this blade shape; in fact, some of the earliest European iron utility knives had this exact blade shape. It's tempting to infantilize blacksmiths of old and explain that the sheepsfoot is an easy shape to forge and easy to fit into a simple friction-folding knife format, but I think the dynamic of the blade was recognized long ago and has remained a popular choice of blade shape in folding knives. Depending on the type of blade being made, sheep's blades can have several different personalities, lending to different types of use. On a small light blade, such as the paring knives especially popular in northern Europe, a flat edge with a pointed tip is great for peeling and cutting veggies. Whereas in English this type of knife is referred to as a ‘paring knife’, intimating its use in Germany, it is called a “gemüsemesser”- “vegetable knife”- as it is used for a wide variety of tasks involving vegetables. There is a story that I heard in Solingen as an explanation of the origin of the birds beak paring knife (a sheepsfoot with inward curving beak-shaped blade); in the 19th century, carbon steel sheeps foot paring knives - gemüsemesser would be used in hand by women in the country at green bean harvest to cut handfuls of beans. As the knives cut hundreds of beans (and not hitting a cutting board), they would become worn in the center and would grip the beans more effectively. These women would bring their worn knives to knife makers in Solingen and request that their gemüsemesser be sharpened in this way, giving rise to the bird's beak from the sheepsfoot gemüsemesser. I don’t know if this parallels the origin of the bird’s beak in other places, the French are known to be maniacal in haute cuisine kitchens with these traumatizing young cooks with endless hours of seven-sided potatoes cut with a bird's beak, or tournée knife; named after its use, ‘turning’. My shame at not immediately referencing the table knife applications of the sheepsfoot is compounded by the fact that I had recently found an amazingly elegant set of small hand forged and very finely ground sheepsfoot table knives marked “Marnet” with intricate, perfectly set ferrules and ebony handles that scream very early 19th century “Empire period” France. Also in the same collection is a somewhat mysterious large sheepsfooted knife with a knurled horn handle and an etching of a hunting scene on its massive blade. Unmarked, possibly from the early 18th century or very early 19th guessing from the clothes of the hunters, and possibly from Italy, Germany, or France. Definitely a part of a very fine set of knives for the butchering, carving, and serving of the game hunted in the swells' hunting parties. Hunting in Europe was mostly not a commoner's time, like in the United States, and the apportionments of hunting and carving of game were very lavish, definitely part of a show of wealth and position. Similar-shaped knives of varying sizes can be seen in use in the amazing 1581 Italian treatise on carving ‘Il trinciante’ by Vicenzo Cervio, a master carver and officer in the household of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Cervio’s style of carving was done with the meat of choice (from tiny quail on up to large joints) held up on a fork and elegantly sliced in the air (I would like to say ‘think baroque Benihana', but this is the Renaissance). The role of such a carver was not limited to the skillful slicing of meat but to entertain and provide a very important hospitality function at a potentially tense moment in a meal, who is getting more or who is getting served first. Back to my two sheepsfoot knives: these bookend the different benefits and strengths of the sheepsfoot. Our Marnet table knives can delicately and precisely cut all sorts of food on the plate, especially meats, with only the tip in contact with the plate; its edge is protected and ready for work with a minimum of effort. On the other hand our ‘big faka’ has a long capable blade, and even with a nice taper in it’s thickness and a swedge grind on the spine behind the tip edge theres a good amount of weight at the tip giving a short swing a lot of power, perfect for getting through the tough sinew and tendons of active game animals as well as finishing the cuts at joints. These two capacities, precision and punch, varying on the size of the sheepsfoot in play, have also had long-standing places in the knives of the Netherlands, where the ‘boscher’ knife has been an iconic Dutch knife. Narrower at the waist where the blade begins at the handle,e flaring out in width towards the very accentuated sheepsfoot tip, they have alternately been personal carry utility knives (before one would be assured a knife to borrow when eating away from home) or utility knives ranging from intricately carved boxwood handled knives to simple agricultural tools for harvesting. Knives in this pattern formed a large amount of exports from Solingen to the nearby Netherlands in the 19th and early 20th century, the hand forged, hand ground blades simply but neatly fitted to an oval profiled handle. Using a boscher is a departure from a chef knife, which thrives on the forward rocking push cut. Due to the boscher’s flaring tip, a push cut does not engage the edge the same as a pull cut, which, due to the widening blade, provides bite, and the wide tip helps to steer the blade straight through the cut. While I have not harvested any veggies with one for bread, it is very competent, and with cooked or uncooked meat has a very direct, authoritative slicing motion. The name ‘boscher’ is unclear to me. I suspect it might have roots in the French ‘bocher’ or butcher knife; the family name Boscher is also an occupational name for one who sells wood or manages a forest, but I miss the connection to this knife and wood… Anyhow, this sheepsfoot has a very different and strong accent of its own, but is a great example of the pull cut potential of the sheepsfoot, a somewhat overlooked feature of many knives common to us here in the US, outside of narrow carving or fillet slicers. Arguably, the most important and stealthy sheepsfoot is the mother of today's classic bread knife, the Hamburg knife, which has a kind of double hump backed sheepsfoot shape. If the boscher is the dromedary of the sheepsfoot, this is the double humped bactrian. Local to the northern Hamburg region this bread knife was designed with a backwards-facing handle to facilitate cutting bread held under the arm (without a cutting board) in the fields at lunchtime. In Germany, bread knives became thicker as one headed north, the southern wheat growing zone giving way to the northern rye-lands and their more stodgier rye breads. The Hamburg shape somehow became the dominant style in the 19th century (more money for buying bread knives up north then??), but remained a short, non-serrated knife with the backwards curving handle. This design was curiously taken up, it seems, by the English in the mid-19th century as well, with numerous Sheffield-made knives done with a 5 to 7-inch blade and a carved wheat ear handle, often saying ‘Bread’. How it jumped to Britain, I do not know, but knife makers are keen to have a new knife to sell. Victorians needed no encouragement to add utensils, and als,o knife makers are a promiscuous lot and do not adhere to cultural purity in knife design. Especially in the era of the printed catalog of the 19th-century industrial knife design, espionage was sped up rapidly as domestic and export markets became more up for grabs. The stealthy part of the Hamburg knife is in how its double humped sheepsfoot blade morphed into today's ubiquitous bread knife shape. Look at a traditional Hamburg-style bread knife alone, and it just looks a little weird with its sow belly camel back action, but put next to a typical bread knife today, and it definitely reads as a progenitor. In a way, it would make sense that Germany’s main impact on culinary knife design is through the bread knife, as Germany holds the greatest density of bread varieties in the world today. Aside from being reminded about the charms and arguments for the sheepsfoot blade, this little adventure with the sheepsfoot has reminded me of the phenomenon of knife users rediscovering the value of certain traditional designs. In this case, restaurateurs are rediscovering the value of the sheepsfoot blade for use at the table, where dull steak knives are a persistent issue. For them, discovering Roland’s sheepsfoot table knives must have felt like a revelation, even though it's a solution discovered long, long ago. So it is with culinary knife design in constant rediscovery, it seems, and so it also seems I am being driven to end with a platitude here. But I will let you fill in your favorite in the spirit of rediscovery.