Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

a bad knife. You go to do a perfect potato allumette, that's thinner than a pencil. Your perfect cheveu cut, that's about as big around as a wire—that's half as thick as a potato chip. You make your living cutting carrots brunoisette with hot sauté pans already waiting with butter, people yelling for those potatoes cut minunette, and you learn quick the difference between a bad knife and a Kutting-Blok.

The stories I could tell you. Time and time again, how your knives have pulled my ass out of the fire. You chiffonade Belgian endive for eight hours, and you might get some idea what my life is like.

Still, it never fails, you can tourné baby carrots all day, carving each one into a perfect orange football, and the one you screw up, that carrot lands on the plate of some failed cook, some nobody with a community-college degree in hospitality services, just a piece of paper, who now thinks he's a restaurant critic. Some prick who hardly knows how to chew and swallow, and he's writing in next week's paper how the chef at Chez Restaurant is lousy at tourné-ing carrots.

Some bitch no caterer would even hire to flute mushrooms, she's putting in print how my bâtonnet parsnips are too thick.

These sellouts. No, it's always easier to nitpick than actually to cook the meal.

Every time somebody orders the dauphinoise potatoes or the beef Carpaccio, please know that someone in our kitchen says a little prayer of thanks for Kutting-Blok knives. The perfect balance of them. The riveted handle.

Sure, knock wood, we would all like to make more money for less work. But selling out, turning critic, setting yourself up as a know-it-all, and taking cheap shots at the people still trying to make their living peeling calf tongue . . . paring away kidney fat . . . pulling off liver membrane . . . while those critics sit in their nice clean offices and type their gripes with nice clean fingers—that's just not right.

Of course, this is just their opinion. But there it is, showcased next to real news—famines and serial killers and earthquakes—there it's given the same-sized type. Somebody's gripe that their pasta wasn't quite al dente. As if their opinion is an Act of God.

A negative guarantee. The opposite of an advertisement.

To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe.

Not journalism. Not objective. Not reporting, but judging.

These critics, they couldn't cook a great meal if their life depended on it.

It's with this in mind I started my project.

No matter how good you are, working in a kitchen is a slow death by a million tiny knife cuts. Ten thousand little burns. Scalds. Standing on concrete all night, or walking across greasy or wet floors. Carpal tunnel, nerve damage from stirring and chopping and spooning. Deveining an ocean of shrimp under ice water. Knee pain and varicose veins. Wrist and shoulder repetitive-motion injuries. A career of perfect calamares rellenos is a lifelong martyrdom. A lifetime spent turning out the ideal ossobuco alla milanese is a long, slow death by torture.

Still, no matter how thick-skinned you are, getting picked apart in public by some newspaper or Internet writer does not help.

Those online critics, they're a dime a dozen. Everybody with a mouth and a computer.

That's what all my targets have in common. It's a blessing the police don't work a little closer together. They might notice a freelance writer in Seattle, a student reviewer in Miami, a Midwestern tourist posting his opinion on some travel Web site . . . There is a pattern to my sixteen targets, so far. Yes, and there's my years of motivation.

There's not much difference between boning a rabbit and a snarky Web-site blogger who said your costatine al finocchio needed more Marsala.

And thanks to Kutting-Blok knives. Your forged tourné knives do both jobs beautifully, without the hand and wrist fatigue you might get using a less expensive, stamped paring knife.

Likewise, cleaning a skirt steak and skinning the little weasel who posted an article about how your beef Wellington was ruined with too much foie gras, both jobs go fast and effortless thanks to the flexible blade of your eight-inch filleting knife.

Easy to sharpen and easy to clean. Your knives are a blessing.

It's the targets that always turn out to be such a disappointment. No matter how little you expect when you meet these people in person.

All it takes is a little praise to arrange a get-together. Imply the kind of sexual partner they might want. Better yet, imply you're the editor of a national magazine, looking to take their voice worldwide. To exalt them. Give them the glory they so richly deserve. Lift them to prominence. All that attention crap, offer them half that and they'll meet you in any dark alley you can name.

In person, their eyes are always so small, each eye like a black marble stuck into a fat man's bellybutton. Thanks in part to Kutting-Blok knives, they look better, cleaned and dressed and trimmed. Meat, ready for some good use.

After you've pulled the cold viscera out of a hundred guinea hens, it's no big deal, slitting the belly of a freelance writer who wrote in some regional entertainment guide that your escarole-feta turnovers were too chewy. No, the Kutting-Blok ten-inch French knife makes even that task as easy as gutting a trout or salmon or any round fish.

It's odd, the parts that stand out in your mind. A look at someone's thin, white ankle, and you can see who she must've been as a girl in school, before she learned to make her living by attacking food. Or another critic, who wore his brown shoes polished bright as the caramel crust on a crème brûlée.

It's this same attention to detail that you put into every knife.

This is the care and attention I used to put into my kitchen work.

Still, no matter how careful I am, it's just a matter of time before the police will catch me.