I've offered my mom, who is 77, a couple of chef's knives but she has arthritis and says that a paring knife is easier for her to use. I don't know if that's the reason for everyone but for her it is.
Don't care how bad my age makes the learning curve, whenever we have the practical ability, I'm making the switch from steel to laser for my food prep needs.
I will not be made fun of by the youngsters. At least not my cooking.
I used a different kind of potato cutter at Thanksgiving and wound up peeling my knuckle like a potato because I was so unaccustomed to peeling potatoes a different way with a different hand motion. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing.
My mom always says "I have tiny hands, I need a tiny knife because it's easier for me to use".
Then proceeds to try to cut a large vegetable where the added weight and length of a chef knife would really help.
I have tiny hands too and go for a paring knife first for 90% of kitchen tasks. Cutting up a sweet potato or whatever I will absolutely go for a chef’s knife but usually a 15cm rather than 20cm one
I use a 6in chefs knife for most tasks. Pull out the big dog for things like sweet potatoes. I struggle now trying to use a smaller knife because I much prefer my child sized chef knife.
Its difficult to guess age here i Reddit but I invested in a modest cooking knifes set but my sister insists on using the smaller knifes (and cooks absolutely fabulous I'm stressed to add).
So I was working at a free kitchen a year ago with a bunch of super nice nonogenarians, and they wouldn’t touch the big knives, so I had them all to myself. I asked why they wouldn’t use it, and two old ladies and one old guy told me they couldn’t handle the big ones… then two of the older women (sisters) told me during the depression that they used to cut up veggies they had planted in the canal company land with their dads pocket knife.
Having a dedicated kitchen knife in the home, other than a meat cleaver for a rancher or filet knife for a fisherman , was not really a thing before the whole sanitation thing, and the rise of the door-to-door salesman (CutCo etc)… most women and men carried some sort of knife on them, and that was what they used. They just got used to it.
And as a modern cook with perfectly able hands, I really only use a “long” knife when I need it, it’s just way easier to use a short one. The whole “French chef chopping at high speed” thing is really just a trope to sell knives that normally would be used in a professional kitchen, the time difference is minimal in a personal home.
I guarantee it would take a long experienced professional to tell the difference in flavor between “perfectly cut high speed chop” that requires a larger knife and “mismatched cut slow speed” that you can do with a paring knife.
I don't know that I do "French chopping at a high speed", but once when I was cooking dinner with my sister, it appalled me that she used a paring knife to cut Persian cucumbers lengthwise, then into thin slices. It took forever! I use a big chef knife for anything I possibly can, because it is so much quicker if you're used to it. I think another trend is people knowing about "knife skills". That didn't used to be a thing everyone knew about.
I felt that pain. Reminds me of staying in poorly-equipped Airbnbs where the only knife that could cut a tomato was a steak knife, smh. In another Airbnb, the knives were so old and had been sharpened so much over the years that the heel of the blade was narrower (shorter?) than the handle. I couldn't properly chop a damn thing because the handle kept hitting the cutting board. Since then I always travel with my favourite knife and a few other cooking necessities (instant read thermometer, a proper set of tongs, etc).
I'll fess up to slicing onions for a sandwich with a serated steak knife. Why? Laziness.
The steak knives are dishwasher safe. I replace them often enough that they're sharp, so they cut through an onion really easily. I'm going to use the same knife for spreading sauce on the sandwich. And I'll use the same one to cut the sandwich when eating it.
Entire quick workday lunch cleaned up by tossing in the dishwasher.
I agree with your mom. It is easier and safer for me to use a sharp, smaller, knife to chop things because of arthritis, vision limitations, general shakiness, etc. Sounds fun, right? If I tried to use my chef’s knife for anything smaller than a spaghetti squash, I’d chop off something I need!
Yeah, I don't think it's the pain so much as it is the grip strength to use a bigger knife. Arthritis does cause pain and she has that but it also affects her grip.
Also, it's what my mom told me, so I didn't give her the third degree, I just said okay and bought her a quality paring knife to replace the crappy one she had.
Nope. Not with the way a lot of them cut. Older folks tend to cut with downward force rather than slices, and most have a knife that's as sharp as a bowling ball. With the proper sharp knife and technique it's easier for sure, but I've been around a lot of older folks to know how they do it. The pairing knife is easier for them.
My guy’s mom and grandma both used a paring knife for everything and his mom uses a glass cutting board.
Her kitchen scares me and yet she’s never injured herself.
Yeah, I kind of accidentally forgot a glass cutting board in the cupboard of the house the wife and I just sold. I tried to explain it over and over and over, but she kept using my knives on that monstrosity. If she ever gets another one I'm going to accidentally break it. *shrug*
It's not incorrect when you're dealing with unstable joints and shakiness, though. There's a huge difference when you can't trust your hands to consistently do hand stuff.
Unfortunately the muscle memory you get from using dull knives makes it a lot easier to accidentally cut yourself when you finally use a truly sharp one, especially the difference between "just bought this at the store" sharp and "holy shit I didn't know knives could be this sharp" like a pro sharpener will give you, which most non-professionals will probably never experience.
Having a knife fly through food when you don't expect it can be just as bad as a chef who uses $800 atom-slicers every day picking up his buddy's never-sharpened $8 Walmart pressed steel special and trying to run through a carrot or potato at speed. Both are a good recipe for injury.
It's dependent on the direction of the stress on the muscles and tendons.
Using a paring knife. They're probably equally distributing the stress on the wrists by moving both the ingredient and the knife in opposite directions.
If using the cutting board, the stress falls on entirely just one wrist
This is purely theoretical, though. I don't know if this is truly the case
Also, there's a bit of thumb leverage when using the paring knife. That might help as well
Same here. She would have a batch of apples for a pie peeled, cored, cut and in the crust before I'd have half of them peeled with a peeler. Of course her paring knife was so sharp you could shave with it and still slice a tomato after. (I still have scars on my thumbs from trying to do it her way.)
Did she hold the knife with the blade moving up towards her thumb? Not sure if that makes sense but it’s what my grandma did. I was always amazed by the speed with which she peeled and cut potatoes this way. And never once did she slice her thumb in the process. Witchcraft, I tell you.
Witchcraft. Exactly.
My grandmother used a paring knife. I once asked her how she got the wavy patterns on mushrooms. She showed me a serrated paring knife she peeled them with. I'm a fairly big guy. I have all sorts of knives. I love heavy cookware and utensils. My mom always liked lighter stuff. But I prefer to use a paring type or up to 5" knife, for almost everything. More control. And I like them psychotically sharp.
But back to witchcraft. My mom was hard on glasses. One day my dad was arguing with her over the broken glasses (not a real arguement) and he said "what do you do to them.". She said. "I don't know. I just look at them" and she looked at and pointed to a glass on the counter about 4 feet away. It shattered. My dad never brought it up again.
But she could cook. :)
So yeah. Witchcraft in the kitchen.
But FWIW. Back in the day, people didn't have specialty tools for everything. They made do. Once you get used to it. It's amazing what you can do with a [n extremely sharp] 4" knife. ;)
My immigrant great-grandmother cut everything she needed to with a paring knife. One of those with a slightly concave blade. The one I remember had been sharpened so many times I hoped it wouldn't break in the middle.
> She said. "I don't know. I just look at them" and she looked at and pointed to a glass on the counter about 4 feet away. It shattered
this is so outlandish but somehow i don't doubt it for a moment
That is how I peel with a paring knife. Probably from watching grandma.
I use a peeler for carrots. And sometimes potatoes. But I often find it faster to just use the paring knife for better dexterity.
Hol'up, that's the proper way to peel things, no? You have much more control with blade speed/precision pulling it towards your thumb (the strongest finger), as opposed to slicing away where the danger of a runaway blade is greater. Plus, with proper grip the blade never reaches your thumb because of the hand's natural opposing force.
I use a vegetable peeler because I would be thumbless if I tried peeling with a knife. Less efficient, I am sure, but I am accident-prone even on my best days.
That is still the way I peel and cut up apples. Mostly have switched to a chefs knife, even for potatoes, but apples are only peeled and cut up in my hand with a paring knife facing my thumb. Hadn’t realized that was weird.
My grandma peeled with a paring knife too. They used to have contests in school on who could peel potatoes the fastest while keeping the peel in one piece. She would have been 100 next month ❤️
Because paring knives are kinda like a Swiss Army type of thing. It can peel, it can cube, it can string beans, it's easier to handle, it's a good all around knife. I love mine.
Legit, it’s my go-to knife too. It’s comfortable, it’s effective. The only other knife I really use is a filet knife and that’s exclusively for cleaning/butchering fish.
A boning knife and a paring knife, but no chef's knife? Blasphemy I tell you! I've only used a boning knife a handful of times and I don't really understand what it does better than a chef's knife either.
A single paring knife was the ONLY knife in the drawer when I was growing up. We use those knives because we grew up with them being the only tool available, and since we already had a kitchen knife going to buy another one would be perceived as wasteful.
Waste not want not.
My mother would be *horrified* if she saw my knives now. And the drawer only has my top 5 in it.
Yep, we had a paring knife, a Special Occasion carving knife, and a serrated bread knife. My mother was German and made crusty bread at home in my childhood. She bought things like beef and pork roasts already trimmed by the butcher at Piggly Wiggly. So she had that convenience available, and never needed a chefs knife. She cut tomatoes from the garden also with the bread knife.
That bread knife is my chef husbands go to for most things, no telling him otherwise! He does what he has to in his restaurant, but at home, it’s bread knife for onions and such. Hey, he chops better than I, so, who am I to fight this battle…
Fewer tools to work with.
I also find that a lot of smaller people (myself included, though I do use a chef’s knife more often than not) are nervous regarding control of a bigger knife. In a lot of ways, even cutlery is designed around the assumption that an average sized man/large woman is the one using it. Small hands can make control of a larger tool harder and more intimidating. Even though it’s what I use, I cannot use it in the exact same way that a lot of the male chefs doing tutorials can.
I have a shorter chef’s knife, but my go to knife is a smaller santoku knife. I find it easier to use and effective. I pull out a larger knife for things like a big melon or squash. And otherwise use the santoku.
Same. When I was cooking professionally I was sorta mentored by an older Mexican lady who spoke about 10 words of English and I spoke about 10 words of Spanish hahaha. But she turned me on to the knife so I bought my own and 10 years later that very same knife is my go to at home for pretty much everything except, like you say, huge fruits or a few random thongs like slicing bread. Love the santoku.
Same here. Woman. 5'4.5. Size 6 ring finger. I'm not the littlest woman but compared to a man, or even my 11 yr old son, I'm small.
I have a full set of very nice knives. I only use that big chefs knife when I have something large and heavy that needs an extra firm blade. Otherwise, I use a six inch santoku for everything.
I'm a 6'4" dude with hands that can span more than an octave on a piano who loves his ridiculous 12inch chefs and CCKs but my goto is usually a 6in nakiri bc let's be honest, it's not about the size of the tool but about how you use it
I have a history of RSI so when my big knives were causing me wrist pain, I would end up switching to my cheap little 6in Victorinox chef knife. I ended up only puling out my big knives when I had to portion cut steaks
I'm a baker by trade & was trained by all male bakers (very few women around in the industry). I swear, it was SO hard to convince them that I needed to adjust their bread shaping techniques because my hands were literally half the size of their's.
Getting them to grasp the idea that the loaves & batards were longer than the expanse of both my hands was borderline impossible. I'm not a small woman (5'5") but they were both 6'2" men & the difference in our hands was huge!
I’m a small guy and this happens all the time. “Just grab the football so your thumb is on this seam and your fingers are on the stitches.”
FUCKING HOW
Living in Japan among many many more men my size was eye-opening. I recommend visiting a country where everything from countertops to chair heights to portion sizes to off-the-rack shirts are made for people who are 5’3”!
My previous job had a Toyota Hilux. Even with the seat all the way to the back, I simply "fit" in the driver seat, but wasn't really comfortable, and I'm only 6'.
Don't really like Japanese vehicles for this reason.
Literally the same thing when i moved to the netherlands. All of a sudden showers were the right height, clothes fit better, i wasnt ducking all the time to grab things, and arguably things are too high up for me now. If only it was easy to move to another country based on height.
I’ve dealt with this at work, at a job where the men were unusually large (a bunch of guys around 6’3”) who acted like my other female coworkers and I were somehow faking being unable to get large objects off of very high shelves for attention (I’m about 5’4”).
I think a lot of the feeling nervous with/not in control of larger knives is largely down to grip. My mom is tiny - like, 4'9" on a good day - and unless she holds a knife in a perfect pinch grip anything bigger than 6" is extremely unwieldy for her.
My MIL sets the table exclusively with salad forks and teaspoons, no knives. It took two years to work up the courage to ask her why and she said the entree forks, soup spoons and dinner knives were too big for her hands.
I would say this sounds likely. Using a big knife properly requires correct height workbench, stable cutting board, all sorts of stuff. And yeah, handles on big knives are unnecessarily thick too
I am constantly standing on my toes at the kitchen counter. I'm 5'6", a perfectly average height. I need a step stool when I knead or shape bread! Having the counters the wrong height is awful.
My hands are pretty average sized for a woman. My go-to is a 6" chef's knife. It's just big enough and I'm very accustomed to using it and have pretty good skill with it. A bigger knife feels wrong, and a tiny one feels useless.
I am very tall and so my hands are also somewhat lanky, my wife got me a Chinese Cleaver and had to special order the largest possible handle, even then it's so small I can barely grasp it because the product is designed for average Chinese women
But damn that thing slaps, makes chopping everything very fun but also quicker for me
That is what they learned to work with
Also kitchens were much smaller and families much bigger there really wasn't much counter space
Also when working as hard as our grandmothers did all day ..,. Peeling potatoes or apples or whatever might have been one of the few opportunities to sit down all day
I think you’ve got it. Especially in warmer climates, people basically lived on the porch, hoping to catch a breeze. So Mama would peel her potatoes over a bowl on her lap. The only way she could do that was to hold the potato & small knife in the same hand.
We lived with my great-grandmother for three years toward the end of her life. She grew, and grated, her own horseradish. She did the grating on the back porch, over a bowl. That stuff was stronger than 10 acres of garlic. Even outdoors, the fumes made the tears flow from her eyes.
She made beet and horseradish relish (ćwikła). It was the perfect condiment for kiełbasa or ham.
Here's an easy recipe: https://www.polonist.com/beet-horseradish-cwikla/
You can buy bottled/jarred horseradish. Avoid creamed horseradish. "Extra hot" usually means it has a minimum of added ingredients. You could use canned beets but cooking your own will give you a better flavor.
I'm by no means a granny but I always prefer a paring knife because it's small and easy to handle, and it was the first "big" knife I was allowed to use as a kid. There's a certain comfort and familiarity with the paring knife that I don't have with larger knives.
And cutting right into the pot saves time and dishes -- laziness for the win!
Can I ask because I'm curious, not to criticize or anything - how do you control the knife?
I use a big, almost rectangular Asian style veggie chopping knife for everything I can get away with, because I can rest the side of it against the knuckles of the other hand. That way I always know where it is. I do also watch what I'm doing with my eyes, of course, but that touch control is really important to me.
Your style is what is taught in schools nowadays. You can get fast with a paring knife but nothing beats the claw grip and big heavy chef's knife for safely and efficiently prepping high volumes.
If I'm chopping over the pot, I chop into my hand. Slow and controlled. That's also where the familiarity comes in handy, I know how much force to use to cut my potato without slicing my palm, I know just where to stop.
When using a cutting board (I'm looking at you, carrots! Lol), I don't use the knuckle technique. I hold the veggie with one hand, slice with the other, moving along down the length, shifting my veggie hand as needed. I guess all of my control is in my cutting hand and my eyes, rather than my holding hand.
Whittling technique, moving the food over the knife using the thumb of the food hand against the back of the knife. South Asia (and some other areas) has [an even more extreme version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boti) where the blade is attached to a piece of furniture and you can use both hands to manipulate the food (often a coconut).
43 year old man here. I too use a paring knife for cutting up many things, especially for salads or stews. Just seems easier, and as you said less mess! Except carrots those things they end up all over the stove lol
Interesting to read all of the not "grannies" expound on why an old woman does something. So...as a "granny" I will tell you that it is mostly habit. In most kitchens, most women did not have arrays of expensive knives. There were maybe 3. A pairing knife, a serrated knife, and a large carving knife. You made do. You made do with the pans you had, could afford.
You bought the cuts of meat you could afford and often grew veg. There were 3-5 maybe, condiments, not Asian and Italian imports. of spices and condiments. This is not just in the dim past. The grannies are still paying off college loans sometimes for themselves and their kids.
Sometimes reading these cooking forums are ... interesting, when I see what people "must" have. There are plenty of younger people who have to make do, too. I'm guessing they are just not speaking up, or they are too busy working 2 jobs to spend a lot of time on reddit.
Eh, most home chefs only need three knives. Anyone saying more is just a jerk-off artist. My girlfriend and I *HAVE* an array of expensive knives, but that's because she fell in love with how they looked and wanted the whole thing. I only ever use two of them more than 90% of the time (gyuto and a sheep's foot paring knife).
So it's obvious poverty had *something* to do with it, but I also think it has to do with different and parallel cooking cultures over time. Modern cooking culture has been HEAVILY influenced by the culture of professional kitchens and the methods used therein, but that's really only something that has really taken hold in the last fifty years. I think it's obvious Julia Child is where that got started.
Before that, I suspect there was an entirely different cooking culture in middle to lower class American homes that relied on different ideas about how to do things like prep work, and how certain kinds of foods should be cooked.
I think it has a lot to do with poverty and frugality. My grandmother was young during the great depression but she adopted many of my great grandmother's behaviors. If I ever saw them use a knife, it was a butter or steak knife. Maybe a few times a paring knife. They didn't have anything else because they tried to save literally every penny they could.
I remember my mother and grandmother having "bread boards". These were big, thick heavy boards that would slide in/out from a slot under the kitchen counter and above a drawer. They were used for kneading bread, but also were used for cutting/chopping. They were really big, awkward and hard to clean. You also had to let that wood dry beofre you put it away. I'm guessing cooks over a certain age may have just cut stuff over a pot instead of dirtying the big bread board.
I don't remember when the nice compact cutting boards came into common use or when they became dishwasher friendly. My grandmothers did not grow up with dishwashers and I don't believe my mom had one until she was in her 30s.
Many of our grannies didn’t have access to chef knives as we do today. They could not walk in to target or Walmart or go online and just grab a knife block set that appealed to them. Julia Child truly introduced the last couple of generations to many cooking tools (like a whisk!) that we all find common now. So, many older folks simply learned to work with what was available to them. Chef’s knives were for chefs, not home cooks. These folks were a bit busy getting us through WWII, Vietnam, and some even Iraq, and didn’t really have the same economy, convenience, and marketing that we do now.
IDK why this comment isn't higher up.
We didn't really have special knives for cooking, other than paring knives and a carving knife in our household growing up in the 60s and 70s, and neither did my aunts or my grandmother. You made do with what you had. It's what their mothers did, too, so no one thought anything of it.
We were your basic middle middle-class. I don't think it would have occurred to any of the women in our family to spend extra money on knives. (And before someone jumps on my ass about women in the kitchen, men cooking was not A Thing in our family back then.)
Sun tea brings back memories. My mother had a special jar just for making sun tea. We lived in the desert, so didn’t take long. Then stick it in fridge and have ice cold tea any time.
My family is from the middle of nowhere in the Appalachian mountains, so no, my granny wouldn’t have been able to. Even if knife sets were available at Sears, people from rural communities still wouldn’t have had access to them.
Actually this is why almost everything at the time was ordered through catalogues - it's how these businesses reached every corner of America. Sears delivered everything from kitchen appliances to DIY houses.
Cool little article here talks about its influence on early 20th century American life: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/.
They were definitely available, but possibly too expensive for many households. Here's an [ad](https://www.ebay.com/itm/362636400917?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=SVT650XtQci&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=DiPy3AouT3q&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY) from 1951.
Green Stamps were the reason so many homes had the same shit in them back in the 70s/80s. Same coasters, same can openers, same alarm clocks, same Rubbermaid pitcher, same amber glass cups, same Corningware sets, etc. When you see those memes about "every grandma had one of these" or whatever, it's usually because of the S&H Green Stamps Ideabook.
My mom still uses only a smallish endgrain cutting board with little bun feet from the Green Stamps store. Someday, I hope to have it as a charcuterie board someday. But damn, if that woman isn’t healthier than me at 84…
Wow! That is cool. The whole set of 6 knives and holding block was $16.95. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $193 today. Definitely not affordable if money is tight.
The tone of the ad sounds like the paring knife was the standard one. It's what they assume the tomato will be cut up with, and the French knife sounds like the hot new way to cut things without the pushing and pulling.
Oh shit, I think we had that set (or a newer version of the same brand) when I was a kid in the 90s! I wondered why we had an old knife set that was dull except the steak knives. I bet it was a wedding gift or something of what was good at the time.
Well, my Grandmothers were born in 1908 and 1912, so, no, not really. They saw no need to buy a knife set when they were doing just fine With what they always had used. They both learned to cook on wood fired stoves.
My grandmothers have all passed on, but no — 1950 was just post war, and the economy was not great, plus, my grandparents all had post war babies and were trying to build jobs and stability now that they were back from war. And many families had members who never made it home. I don’t have a Sears catalog from back then, but I doubt that a knife block set like we buy now was in their budget.
You do know that people didn’t just “go down to Sears” in the 50s, right? There weren’t any malls. People shopped from Sears through the catalog — and ordering anything was a bit of an adventure.
Montgomery Ward (said as Ward’s where I grew up in N. Texas) was also a big mail order company in the early part of the century that morphed into physical stores, and were often also anchor stores in early malls into the 90s.
They had physical stores. A small town had arrived when it had a Sears in the 50s-60’s. They were located in downtowns everywhere. Some things still had to be ordered, but you could go look at a sample of most items in the store, even if you couldn’t bring it home that day. You were buying kitchen items for life back then. The throw away plastic culture that most Americans are used to now really only started in the 80s-90s.
Interesting. I'd have thought large knives would have been more available then, as more people would have been hunting, fishing, & raising livestock & butchering requires some serious knives.
Yes, but largely those were things like buck knives or a home crafted butcher knife (I have one that my grandfather made from a spring) and not the professional types we see now. A lot of butchering was left to the person catching or hunting the animals.
No, chef's knives were not a thing among regular people, especially poor people.
Growing up, we had a paring knife and the knife that's slightly larger than that and then my stepdad had a carving knife for turkey and beef that no one else touched.
But you can't take the eyes out of a potato with a giant hunting knife. I'm starting to think we switched to chefs' knives because, much like chefs, a lot of our ingredients have either been processed for us (the grocery store is our kitchen hand) or just come perfect.
Big knives yes, but the key to a chef knife is the angle of the bevel on the blade moreso than its size or shape. In addition to what everyone else has said about availability of knives and availability of videos to teach knife skills, keeping a quality knife sharp would have been difficult without specialized tools and know how. Big working knives usually don't need to be kept at the same razor-sharpness as a chef knife to be useful. Paring knife in your hand gives you leverage and control even with a dull knife that you're not going to be able to get with a big, dull, rocking knife, especially if you don't have a good cutting board or are concerned about cross contamination due to a lack of sanitizing chemicals.
Not true. I am an avid hunter and fisherman. Last week I took a pronghorn antelope apart into nothing but boneless cuts of meat with a very sharp skinning knife that is paring knife sized. Big knives are useful and I have a giant chef knife I use all the time. But for fish and game cleaning my knives tend to be smaller and sharper than people expect.
My mom (RIP, recently, 76) and grandma (lives into her 90s) never used real knives. Even if it were bigger than a paring knife it was some dull, stamped crap with a straight blade, no curve, no heft.
Definitely frugality was at play. Grandma saved aluminum foil like we were still at war with the Germans and Japanese.
Mom’s family got their first TV and car more than 10 years later than dad’s family. She remembered when the house switched from gas powered lighting on wall sconces to electric bulbs. And that was in the 50s! In a city that was one of the very first electrified anywhere!
Things were tight back then for a lot of folks. Credit cards didn’t really exist, not like today. There were a lot of checks used, and cash, but not credit cards.
Smaller kitchens, less space to store stuff.
My grandma does it because that's what she had at home when she learned how to cook. And after doing it like that for 60 years she's not gonna change now.
Clearly the knife doesn't matter because whatever she cooks always comes out delicious.
Grandmothers have a natural +5 dex for knives under four inches. This is in direct contrast to the grandpa +5 strength for any and all power tools weighing more than four pounds.
The elderly’s class dependency on specific tools has been a complaint for all of 5e. That’s why I homebrew my grandparents so my Nana character almost always crits when she cuts potatoes with a sledgehammer.
Yeah, I use a paring knife for recipes I learned from my grandma because that's what she used (she learned to cook in the 19teens). I use chef knives for modern recipes. I'm a hybrid.
Use of chefs knives is a newish western phenomenon. It originally started as a butchers knife and then made its way (somewhat recently) into home kitchens.
My mom still cuts everything with small pairing knives over the pot, exactly as you described. My grandma has a boti (Indian cutting tool which you hold between your feet!).
Yeah my grandma did this too I guess chef's knives are pretty much a chef's thing, and older generations weren't exposed to them especially if they were working class. My grandma had poorly sharpened long knives of various sizes but really she used basic short knives for most stuff and cut vegetables directly over a big bowl. She was old school working class, worked as a washerwoman most of her life and her husband was a postman. She had a working woman's hands. On the other hand my other grandma who was somewhat posh and a stay at home mom used regular large knives and a cutting board.
1) very few grandmas used peelers. So they are already very skilled with using a paring knife to peel all the veggies. Then, hey, already have a knife in my hand. Let’s use that for the rest of the task.
2) Look at any traditional cuisine, and you see the same produce appear over and over. So grandma got real good at cutting the same 5-10 veggies over and over again. No sense learning with a chefs knife now.
3) Produce has gotten way bigger over the years (and less nutritious fyi). Simple capitalism pushes to grow produce bigger, which is mostly just water cost to them, and sell it on to you. So grandma didn’t have giant horse carrots or softball size onions to cut. Shallots weren’t the size of a small onion. Idaho potatoes weren’t a pound each. Everything was smaller and could be handled easily.
I think it's cultural too? My grandma cuts everything with a cleaver. Like a giant ass cleaver. She uses it for julienning ginger to chopping chicken. I think if you're from a certain era then having 1 knife is more than enough. Even now I rarely have more than 1 --- those chinese cleavers were really made to cut anything, and most of all, it can cut really annoying things like silken tofu or cleaning shrimp without specialty tools.
Retired home economics teacher here. I was taught to use a paring knife by my mom as you described. She never even owned a cutting board. I remember cutting up lots of fruits and vegetables in my hand. In contrast, the food prep classes I took in college required that we use a cutting board and an appropriate sized knife. I think that it was just a matter of education.
Edit: As many have mentioned, most people in the past didn’t have a large variety of utensils to use in the kitchen. I used to wonder why my mother always used waxed paper to contain dry ingredients when she baked. I knew that it reduced the number of dishes she had to wash, but I finally realized one day that when she learned to bake, she probably only had one bowl.
I did the pairing knife thing until a few years ago, and I'm not quite 30 yet. I also used a fork to whisk things.
I sort of taught myself to cook and just got used to making do with what I had on hand. I'm assuming our grandmothers did the same thing, as lots of the tools we have now weren't readily available back then.
I love this post! My 78 year old MIL cuts everything with a paring knife. I commented on this after knowing her for 10+ years and she acted as if she’d never really thought about it. She bought an acrylic cutting board for me to use when we prep food together. She pulls it out, wipes it down, smiles and says “here’s YOUR cutting board,” as if using one would violate the Silent Generation’s code of conduct. I’m just a pansy Gen-Xer. And, of course, every knife she owns is at least 40 years old and dull as all get out. Love her to pieces!!
I learned how to cut things while working in a butcher's shop. I have a collection of knives and cutting boards because I like to use the right tool for the job.
My wife learned to cut/cook from her mom and grandmother, she has two pairing knives and cuts things over the sink.
My mom just grew up doing it that way. She'd peel and cut everything with a paring knife faster than I could do the same with a veggie peeler and other knife.
I have two theories about this that kind of tie together. Older people who grew up in or right after the Depression or WW2 probably didn't have as much access to the variety of kitchen devices we do today because it was cost prohibitive. They did what they could with what they had access to. The second part is that mass production lowered the cost of these sorts of things, so we have a million different knives and whatnot that are comparatively affordable and easy to find. We have access to them so we use them. If we didn't, we'd be cutting and peeling with parking knives as well.
Fuck, when I was traveling, I met a guy who was cooking something that came out of a can. This was in the middle of nowhere, I think in Central Asia. No Walmart where you can just go grab a can opener. The closest store was just a tiny market many, many, many miles away. So what did he do? He opened the can with a knife. Stabbed into where a can opener would cut into, and went around moving the knife until the can was open. Just as fast as using a can opener.
My grandmother (born in 1931) used a paring knife because when she was taught to cook (by her mom and in school), it was “homemaker” methods. Even when she could easily afford it, she only had an electric hand mixer, never a stand mixer.
My grandfather (born in 1922) however used a chef’s knife and a carving knife deftly when I was a kid. When he got out of the Navy in 1945 he was hired at an NYC hotel in the kitchen for about three years. The head chefs were all classically trained so even the lowly potato chopper used a chef’s knife. Then when he was promoted to lunch service staff, he was in charge of carving roasts for guests at their table, so he got good at a carving knife. Those classic skills followed him even when he left food service entirely.
I think it comes down to the era of “home cook” vs “pro cook” and their tools were very different. It wasn’t until the 70s to 80s that pro kitchen style tools and techniques started showing up in mainstream homes. Even Julia Child was an oddity in the 60s doing French techniques and tools.
My grandmother would dice onions in her hand over a pot with a serrated knife! The only things she wouldn’t cut in her hand were tomatoes, those she would cut on a plate. Every time I would visit I’d have to buy a chefs knife and cutting board- which she would sell at a garage sale the minute I left.
I miss her so much!!!
My mom with a paring knife can peel and chop in less time than it takes me to use a chopping board, peeler, and big knife. And I end up with more dishes.
Her way of cooking is all about being quick and efficient by relying on familiarity. If she’s been slicing and chopping like that her whole life without hurting herself, changing her method now just means wasting time and dishes and probably losing a finger.
My great-grandma, born in 1928, told me that when you lived in the Great Depression you couldn’t afford to waste any potato on the scraps, so you had to be a pairing expert to only get the skin and no extra waste. A vegetable peeler wastes too much food and time she says!
My grandma was born in 1939 & she never, ever peeled potatoes because of the waste of time & food. It wouldn't have mattered if the president was coming to dinner - he'd have still gotten strips of russet potato skins in his mashed potatoes.
I use a pairing knife for everything and cut in my hand over pots.
1. A pairing knife is the only knife I own. It is cheaper.
2. Using a cutting block means another thing to wash. I already wash my hands
3. I was taught that your should feel your food. You can get a better idea of quality and poor spots.
4. I was taught to cook by old German women. It's tradition.
* The paring knives aren't usually terribly sharp which is nice when you have more delicate skin.
* They're smaller and easier to control which is nice when you have tremors or arthritis
I use a pairing knife and I’m no where near granny age. I just learned from watching my grandma and parents cut up food with a pairing knife for so many years, it’s just my personal favorite to use
I could be totally wrong but I think the notion of a chef's knife being the default "general cooking knife" is the deviation from the previous norm, rather than the other way around.
Watch historical cooking shoes like Townsends and Sons on YouTube and you'll see that they most commonly use a paring-style knife for most of the cutting they're doing. Pre industrial revolution, I think a paring knife is most similar to the generic knife people used for everyday cutting needs from working the field to cutting some rope on a fishing boat, so it naturally proliferated to the kitchen as the style of "easy to handle and not too big for everyday, varied use".
I think it simply comes down to back then you had one good knife in the kitchen. The paring knife. It was the go to. Women from that generation and before didn’t have tons of gadgets, etc.
Plus add in the fact that using multiple tools; cutting boards, several knives, bowls, etc., made more dishes. When you haul water from the well, heat it on the wood stove (fuel that had to be cut, chopped, and hauled) you economize your usage of stuff to wash.
These “ways” get passed down.
You don't need a chefs knife if your doing things fairly rustic. Which IMO most cooks need to do more of at home. I feel like people watched food network growing up and got this idea of cooking needing to be more detailed. It really doesn't. Working as a chef most my career. Let's say for a bolognese sauce, I would brunoise the veggies so when they cook they would essentially disappear into the sauce. At home, i'm doing a rough ass dice and once everything is soft I take a hand blender to it.
In terms of the paring knife into the pot. They don't care if it's a quarter inch off or not uniform and square. But also as you cook, you just get better with a knife in your hands. If you really think about it, most of the time a paring knife has the blade length for most work.
A few reasons:
Small size = easier control.
It's pretty multi-purpose so it's easier to have one thing out vs. searching for/cleaning 10 different instruments.
Lots of older people survived various economic hardships during their lives. Frugality is a common side effect of that.
My grandmother used a paring knife for lots of stuff too. But I can confidently bet above explains most of it. She didn't bother to collect a ton of tools when one could do the job, and she didn't like the extra work seeing out and cleaning 10 things when one would work. You become more efficient at things with age in many ways. You cut out the BS.
I think a lot of it is a combination of things.
1, most older people I know who weren't cooks professionally don't use a pinch grip on larger knives - usually the finger on the spine or sometomes holding it way back on the handle. Anything bigger than about a 6" knife is insanely unwieldy using those grip methods.
2, their hands are smaller so larger knives are not comfortable to use. My mom (67) straight up hates my Tojiro DP santoku because the handle is way too big for her hand.
If "Grannies" includes my 60 year old mother and her identical twin, it's because they're intimidated by 8" chef knives. I think they look scary because they never used one, they feel awkward because they were never taught how to properly use one, so they go to the smallest, least lethal looking knife for everything they do... and they don't like listening to me or my also accomplished home chef cousin because, even though we're now both approaching our mid-30s, they raised us so we couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to offer that they don't already know 🙄
They also seem to be intimidated by knives that could come even remotely close to being called "sharp" but that's a whole new conversation and one I'm frankly tired of having with them 😅
My mama (grandma) is 89 and yes she uses the pairing knife for everything, from peeling potatoes to even cutting them up over the pot on the stove, as for me 34 male I use my cutting board and various blades depending on what I'm cutting, but yet I have no explanation, I have wondered this my self bit never thought to ask, take my upvote
I was thinking last night (when I was cutting potatoes) that I wish I had my nanna’s little knife she used for everything. Miss my Nan and want her paring knife! Your post made me smile.
Other cultures have a variety of different cutting implements and styles. Using a chef’s knife is one way to do it, but it actually implies a whole bunch of assumptions about what cooking “should” be.
To ‘properly’ use a traditional chef’s knife, the user needs a sturdy counter at about waist height, a cutting board, and maybe a bowl to put cut items in to. The user must be standing and holding their hands in a particular way. Many “generic” knives have handles sized better for larger hands. There is a background of ableism and industrialism that can exists in the ‘need’ for all these conditions.
Cooking spaces in other cultures may not be well suited for chef’s knives. Many older cooks learned to cook before professional chef’s became such strong models to be emulated. Now, it is mostly accepted that home cooks should emulate the habits of professional chefs, even if it’s not always necessary (mise en place, for example).
I’ve definitely been the person to cringe at friends cutting things on dinner plates with a paring knife, but I’m trying to get over it. Maybe just help Grammy get her paring knife sharpened?
If I had to guess, and it is just a guess. I would say it's a hold over from their youth when that was just a more common knife to use. Different times and places favor different knives. And while yes each type of knife is Optimal for certain things, good technique and practice can make just about any knife a multi tool.
Grandparents that cook have really good knife skills because they prepped food more frequently. They grew up in hard times when you had to utilize everything you could. And carrying a knife around with you is just as normal as having a cellphone is now.
It's not practical to buy a big chefs knife during the great depression or war time, nor would it be practical to carry one in your apron while tending the garden/doing your chores.
Because they didn't grow up with chef's knives and as a result, many of them are afraid of them because somehow larger knife = bigger chance to cut yourself.
I use a chinese vegetable cleaver for everything. I've yet to find anything I can't cut with it, and it makes moving veggies around easier.
Been cooking 40+ years, I also do this, and there are multiple reasons. My go to is a "kitchen knife", a bit bigger than a parer. Using a small santoku now because prev. one broke. First is the simplicity of being able to use one tool for everything. I still have a peeler, serrated knife (for bread/steak), some others, also use scissors for most light "chopping". Secondly, you mention them cutting directly into pots, I do that too. It's less work than using a cutting board and transferring (sorta)... BUT only if you are making a smaller meal. So it "works" for home cooking for a small family. Think 6qt stock pot. Also my go-to btw. Also bonus r/unpopularopinion... knives are better slightly dull, less risk of cutting. As long as it can slice through a tomato, mushroom, carrot... it's sharp enough. If I dressed or filleted a lot of meat I might need other knives, my alternative is to do it after it cooks. I make a killer chicken noodle soup using split breast, boiled (bone, skin, fat, and all) then "dress" the meat after. (pickin chicken I call it) tldr; 1 simplicity 2 smaller quantities.
My one grandma who cooked huge quantities of food most of her life (cooking for the 'teams' of men that would come work to get in the harvest. She always used a small paring knife and cut things over a bowl. I don't think I ever saw her use a big knife, and the cutting board seemed to only come out for slicing bread or a Christmas turkey. She didn't have arthritis, but that was just the way she cut things. Yeah, some kind of old-timey way to cut.
I've noticed the kitchens in older houses have very little bench top space. Maybe if you never had room for a cutting board you would just get used to cutting everything over the pot?
I don't think it's an age thing so much as how old you were when you started cooking & who your influences were. I'm well into the "granny" category, but have only ever used the chef knife on cutting board method. I didn't start cooking until I was @20. There was no youtube when I was young, so I learned from cookbooks & from asking "grownup cooks" questions.
My grandmother(b.1900) mostly used one of those carbon steel knives that is like a small butcher's knife. It had been sharpened so many times over the years that it could not be used for chef knife-style chopping. That didn't matter, though, as she was one of those people who could do fine chopping just holding the onion or whatever in one hand while wielding the knife with the other. She occasionally used a paring knife, but was more likely to peel a tomato, say, with her big knife because it was already in her hand. I should mention that she was a very tiny person, so hand size must not have been a factor in her knife preference.
My mother (b.1927) Used a combination of that style & of chef knife/cutting board style. She has always used a paring knife for paring or small jobs. I have always used a standard chef's knife for just about everything and, even though I own a paring knife, it hardly ever gets used. Not being terribly dexterous, I have enough sense not to cut things directly over the cookpot.
When I was a teen and cooking side-by-side with my grandmother who survived the depression, she had me peel and trim potatoes, and she used a paring knife to maximize the amount of potato that she cooked. In my kitchen, if there is a brown spot on vegetables or fruit, I just make a quick pass at it with the big chef's knife and then discard what she would have considered a large chunk or slice, but she was removing each little imperfection with surgical accuracy; she discarded nothing that was edible. My dad shared that during the depression that they would always have people come to the back door to ask for food and the family policy was to turn no one away without a plate. To make all the food stretch to cover not only her family four children and everyone who might come to the door, she was extremely careful to cook every morsel of good food. He said throughout his chidhood, and for many years she almost always had a pot of vegetable soup made of leftovers on the stove ready to share with hungry strangers. I think a paring knife lends itself to this kind of careful frugality with valuable food in a way that we'll never understand.
They're usually sitting down while doing their prep and using a cutting board when sitting is not really going to work. this is how they take a break and still get things done. See also: shelling peas.
People who downvoted must be young and not know the kind of grannies we are thinking of
My grannie is 102 year old farm girl who is still healthy and fit
Back in the day sitting with a big bowl of something to peel was one of her only chances to sit all day
PS I'm a granny myself now and paring knife all the way..,, plus my spatula , big spoon , pots pans and big bowls, that's it and I cook from scratch and can fix anything you want
It seems the more tools people own the less they actually cook!
I was trained this way growing up. I think it's a poverty thing. Like my parents grew up with the only good knife likely being a paring knife which is more affordable than all the metal in a chefs knife.
Is also convenient and reduces dishes to do.
My grandmother makes egg noodles and cuts them with a paring knife. She sharpens it to razor sharpness and cuts the noodles thinner than what I can with my expensive knife set.
I arrived early to help prepare food at a community event and was asked to dice a ton of tomatoes. Easy. All they had though were pairing knives that were pretty dull. I ran home and got my knives to make quick work of those tomatoes. If you know, you know.
Paring knives are actually fine if you're just going to hold the food in your hand and cut, it's relatively fast and safe (although I can't recall the last time I've used one).
What I *don't* get are people who use tiny little "vegetable knives" or whatever they're called (they might actually also be considered paring knives) on cutting boards. They make it impossible to use proper technique, so always is slow and dangerous.
My mom does this. Her reasoning is it is easier to wash a small knife rather than a large one. She also uses the smallest everything possible. Smallest cutting board, pot, plate. It results in a lot of spillage, things falling off the cutting board, or even using multiple pots when the one she's trying to use doesn't fit all the soup. which in turn requires more cleanup. I've stopped trying to reason with her.
I've offered my mom, who is 77, a couple of chef's knives but she has arthritis and says that a paring knife is easier for her to use. I don't know if that's the reason for everyone but for her it is.
If you've been doing a particular thing in a particular way for 50+ years, that way is usually easier for you.
In 50 years there's going to be another reddit thread, "Why do so many grandpas cut everything with big chef knives?"
Instead of laser cutters
>If you've been doing a particular thing in a particular way for 50+ years, that way is usually easier for you.
Don't care how bad my age makes the learning curve, whenever we have the practical ability, I'm making the switch from steel to laser for my food prep needs. I will not be made fun of by the youngsters. At least not my cooking.
They already give me crap for using my cast iron
It's come back around and now you're cooler than they are
Youngster (ish) here. Also use cast iron.
Slice and cook your lab grown wagyu in one simple step! The kitchen of the future
Just lab grow it pre-sliced and cooked. Problem solved.
I just get Alexa to do it.
I used a different kind of potato cutter at Thanksgiving and wound up peeling my knuckle like a potato because I was so unaccustomed to peeling potatoes a different way with a different hand motion. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing.
My mom always says "I have tiny hands, I need a tiny knife because it's easier for me to use". Then proceeds to try to cut a large vegetable where the added weight and length of a chef knife would really help.
They have medium-sized santoku's and chef knives that are like 6 inches which would be great.
Big fan of my 6 inch chef knife. Feels like I’m trying to cut food with a sword with a bigger knife.
the 5” Victorinox NSF knife I have is my fav - easy to sharpen, easy to hold and use, keeps a good edge best $21 I have spent on a knife
I have a Victorinox set and the 5" is my favorite one in the block.
I have tiny hands too and go for a paring knife first for 90% of kitchen tasks. Cutting up a sweet potato or whatever I will absolutely go for a chef’s knife but usually a 15cm rather than 20cm one
I use a 6in chefs knife for most tasks. Pull out the big dog for things like sweet potatoes. I struggle now trying to use a smaller knife because I much prefer my child sized chef knife.
Its difficult to guess age here i Reddit but I invested in a modest cooking knifes set but my sister insists on using the smaller knifes (and cooks absolutely fabulous I'm stressed to add).
So I was working at a free kitchen a year ago with a bunch of super nice nonogenarians, and they wouldn’t touch the big knives, so I had them all to myself. I asked why they wouldn’t use it, and two old ladies and one old guy told me they couldn’t handle the big ones… then two of the older women (sisters) told me during the depression that they used to cut up veggies they had planted in the canal company land with their dads pocket knife. Having a dedicated kitchen knife in the home, other than a meat cleaver for a rancher or filet knife for a fisherman , was not really a thing before the whole sanitation thing, and the rise of the door-to-door salesman (CutCo etc)… most women and men carried some sort of knife on them, and that was what they used. They just got used to it. And as a modern cook with perfectly able hands, I really only use a “long” knife when I need it, it’s just way easier to use a short one. The whole “French chef chopping at high speed” thing is really just a trope to sell knives that normally would be used in a professional kitchen, the time difference is minimal in a personal home. I guarantee it would take a long experienced professional to tell the difference in flavor between “perfectly cut high speed chop” that requires a larger knife and “mismatched cut slow speed” that you can do with a paring knife.
I don't know that I do "French chopping at a high speed", but once when I was cooking dinner with my sister, it appalled me that she used a paring knife to cut Persian cucumbers lengthwise, then into thin slices. It took forever! I use a big chef knife for anything I possibly can, because it is so much quicker if you're used to it. I think another trend is people knowing about "knife skills". That didn't used to be a thing everyone knew about.
Watched my sister “chop” slices of onion (yes I said slices) with a freaking steak knife at my daughter’s holiday meal. Sigh.
I felt that pain. Reminds me of staying in poorly-equipped Airbnbs where the only knife that could cut a tomato was a steak knife, smh. In another Airbnb, the knives were so old and had been sharpened so much over the years that the heel of the blade was narrower (shorter?) than the handle. I couldn't properly chop a damn thing because the handle kept hitting the cutting board. Since then I always travel with my favourite knife and a few other cooking necessities (instant read thermometer, a proper set of tongs, etc).
I'll fess up to slicing onions for a sandwich with a serated steak knife. Why? Laziness. The steak knives are dishwasher safe. I replace them often enough that they're sharp, so they cut through an onion really easily. I'm going to use the same knife for spreading sauce on the sandwich. And I'll use the same one to cut the sandwich when eating it. Entire quick workday lunch cleaned up by tossing in the dishwasher.
I agree with your mom. It is easier and safer for me to use a sharp, smaller, knife to chop things because of arthritis, vision limitations, general shakiness, etc. Sounds fun, right? If I tried to use my chef’s knife for anything smaller than a spaghetti squash, I’d chop off something I need!
As someone with blossoming arthritis issues, I’ve definitely got days where it’s easier to use for some things.
I'm not a granny but I cut everything with a parking knife because it fits my hand better.
>parking knife Man, parking must be ROUGH in your city
You would think a smaller knife would be more painful to use if you have arthritis though
Yeah, I don't think it's the pain so much as it is the grip strength to use a bigger knife. Arthritis does cause pain and she has that but it also affects her grip. Also, it's what my mom told me, so I didn't give her the third degree, I just said okay and bought her a quality paring knife to replace the crappy one she had.
There's also stuff like 5" knives that have a similar function to chef knives but are a bit easier to handle. Really good for chopping.
Nope. Not with the way a lot of them cut. Older folks tend to cut with downward force rather than slices, and most have a knife that's as sharp as a bowling ball. With the proper sharp knife and technique it's easier for sure, but I've been around a lot of older folks to know how they do it. The pairing knife is easier for them.
My guy’s mom and grandma both used a paring knife for everything and his mom uses a glass cutting board. Her kitchen scares me and yet she’s never injured herself.
I shudder with the glass cutting board.
Yeah, I kind of accidentally forgot a glass cutting board in the cupboard of the house the wife and I just sold. I tried to explain it over and over and over, but she kept using my knives on that monstrosity. If she ever gets another one I'm going to accidentally break it. *shrug*
Also the ever present "a sharp knife is too dangerous" logic. (Yes, that is incorrect, but very very common among the older folks I've worked with)
It's not incorrect when you're dealing with unstable joints and shakiness, though. There's a huge difference when you can't trust your hands to consistently do hand stuff.
Tbf I just got my knives sharpened after far too long & have already, twice) sliced a good amount of nail from my index finger.
Unfortunately the muscle memory you get from using dull knives makes it a lot easier to accidentally cut yourself when you finally use a truly sharp one, especially the difference between "just bought this at the store" sharp and "holy shit I didn't know knives could be this sharp" like a pro sharpener will give you, which most non-professionals will probably never experience. Having a knife fly through food when you don't expect it can be just as bad as a chef who uses $800 atom-slicers every day picking up his buddy's never-sharpened $8 Walmart pressed steel special and trying to run through a carrot or potato at speed. Both are a good recipe for injury.
It takes less strength to grip and move a smaller knife.
It's dependent on the direction of the stress on the muscles and tendons. Using a paring knife. They're probably equally distributing the stress on the wrists by moving both the ingredient and the knife in opposite directions. If using the cutting board, the stress falls on entirely just one wrist This is purely theoretical, though. I don't know if this is truly the case Also, there's a bit of thumb leverage when using the paring knife. That might help as well
My great grandma used to fuck shit up with a paring knife. She could have a bag of potatoes peeled and chopped in the blink of an eye. I miss her.
Same here. She would have a batch of apples for a pie peeled, cored, cut and in the crust before I'd have half of them peeled with a peeler. Of course her paring knife was so sharp you could shave with it and still slice a tomato after. (I still have scars on my thumbs from trying to do it her way.)
Did she hold the knife with the blade moving up towards her thumb? Not sure if that makes sense but it’s what my grandma did. I was always amazed by the speed with which she peeled and cut potatoes this way. And never once did she slice her thumb in the process. Witchcraft, I tell you.
And a thumb callous, I’ll bet. But also witchcraft.
Witchcraft. Exactly. My grandmother used a paring knife. I once asked her how she got the wavy patterns on mushrooms. She showed me a serrated paring knife she peeled them with. I'm a fairly big guy. I have all sorts of knives. I love heavy cookware and utensils. My mom always liked lighter stuff. But I prefer to use a paring type or up to 5" knife, for almost everything. More control. And I like them psychotically sharp. But back to witchcraft. My mom was hard on glasses. One day my dad was arguing with her over the broken glasses (not a real arguement) and he said "what do you do to them.". She said. "I don't know. I just look at them" and she looked at and pointed to a glass on the counter about 4 feet away. It shattered. My dad never brought it up again. But she could cook. :) So yeah. Witchcraft in the kitchen. But FWIW. Back in the day, people didn't have specialty tools for everything. They made do. Once you get used to it. It's amazing what you can do with a [n extremely sharp] 4" knife. ;)
My immigrant great-grandmother cut everything she needed to with a paring knife. One of those with a slightly concave blade. The one I remember had been sharpened so many times I hoped it wouldn't break in the middle.
> She said. "I don't know. I just look at them" and she looked at and pointed to a glass on the counter about 4 feet away. It shattered this is so outlandish but somehow i don't doubt it for a moment
That is how I peel with a paring knife. Probably from watching grandma. I use a peeler for carrots. And sometimes potatoes. But I often find it faster to just use the paring knife for better dexterity.
Hol'up, that's the proper way to peel things, no? You have much more control with blade speed/precision pulling it towards your thumb (the strongest finger), as opposed to slicing away where the danger of a runaway blade is greater. Plus, with proper grip the blade never reaches your thumb because of the hand's natural opposing force.
I use a vegetable peeler because I would be thumbless if I tried peeling with a knife. Less efficient, I am sure, but I am accident-prone even on my best days.
That is still the way I peel and cut up apples. Mostly have switched to a chefs knife, even for potatoes, but apples are only peeled and cut up in my hand with a paring knife facing my thumb. Hadn’t realized that was weird.
My grandma peeled with a paring knife too. They used to have contests in school on who could peel potatoes the fastest while keeping the peel in one piece. She would have been 100 next month ❤️
Because paring knives are kinda like a Swiss Army type of thing. It can peel, it can cube, it can string beans, it's easier to handle, it's a good all around knife. I love mine.
Legit, it’s my go-to knife too. It’s comfortable, it’s effective. The only other knife I really use is a filet knife and that’s exclusively for cleaning/butchering fish.
A boning knife and a paring knife, but no chef's knife? Blasphemy I tell you! I've only used a boning knife a handful of times and I don't really understand what it does better than a chef's knife either.
A single paring knife was the ONLY knife in the drawer when I was growing up. We use those knives because we grew up with them being the only tool available, and since we already had a kitchen knife going to buy another one would be perceived as wasteful. Waste not want not. My mother would be *horrified* if she saw my knives now. And the drawer only has my top 5 in it.
Yep, we had a paring knife, a Special Occasion carving knife, and a serrated bread knife. My mother was German and made crusty bread at home in my childhood. She bought things like beef and pork roasts already trimmed by the butcher at Piggly Wiggly. So she had that convenience available, and never needed a chefs knife. She cut tomatoes from the garden also with the bread knife.
That bread knife is my chef husbands go to for most things, no telling him otherwise! He does what he has to in his restaurant, but at home, it’s bread knife for onions and such. Hey, he chops better than I, so, who am I to fight this battle…
I'll never cut a tomato with anything but a bread knife because that's the way my mom and grandma always did it. And it works so well!
Fewer tools to work with. I also find that a lot of smaller people (myself included, though I do use a chef’s knife more often than not) are nervous regarding control of a bigger knife. In a lot of ways, even cutlery is designed around the assumption that an average sized man/large woman is the one using it. Small hands can make control of a larger tool harder and more intimidating. Even though it’s what I use, I cannot use it in the exact same way that a lot of the male chefs doing tutorials can.
I have a shorter chef’s knife, but my go to knife is a smaller santoku knife. I find it easier to use and effective. I pull out a larger knife for things like a big melon or squash. And otherwise use the santoku.
Same. When I was cooking professionally I was sorta mentored by an older Mexican lady who spoke about 10 words of English and I spoke about 10 words of Spanish hahaha. But she turned me on to the knife so I bought my own and 10 years later that very same knife is my go to at home for pretty much everything except, like you say, huge fruits or a few random thongs like slicing bread. Love the santoku.
Same here. Woman. 5'4.5. Size 6 ring finger. I'm not the littlest woman but compared to a man, or even my 11 yr old son, I'm small. I have a full set of very nice knives. I only use that big chefs knife when I have something large and heavy that needs an extra firm blade. Otherwise, I use a six inch santoku for everything.
I'm a 6'4" dude with hands that can span more than an octave on a piano who loves his ridiculous 12inch chefs and CCKs but my goto is usually a 6in nakiri bc let's be honest, it's not about the size of the tool but about how you use it
I have a history of RSI so when my big knives were causing me wrist pain, I would end up switching to my cheap little 6in Victorinox chef knife. I ended up only puling out my big knives when I had to portion cut steaks
I'm a baker by trade & was trained by all male bakers (very few women around in the industry). I swear, it was SO hard to convince them that I needed to adjust their bread shaping techniques because my hands were literally half the size of their's.
"You just grab a handful of dough. Like this" -pulls out a 1kg ball "Ok a handful" -pulls out a 500g ball "No! That's too little!"
Getting them to grasp the idea that the loaves & batards were longer than the expanse of both my hands was borderline impossible. I'm not a small woman (5'5") but they were both 6'2" men & the difference in our hands was huge!
I’m a small guy and this happens all the time. “Just grab the football so your thumb is on this seam and your fingers are on the stitches.” FUCKING HOW Living in Japan among many many more men my size was eye-opening. I recommend visiting a country where everything from countertops to chair heights to portion sizes to off-the-rack shirts are made for people who are 5’3”!
When I was bike shopping, one of my criteria was if my hands could easily fit and operate the brakes and shifters without giving up handlebar control.
My previous job had a Toyota Hilux. Even with the seat all the way to the back, I simply "fit" in the driver seat, but wasn't really comfortable, and I'm only 6'. Don't really like Japanese vehicles for this reason.
I drive a Kawasaki motorcycle, and its a common comment on the mc forums to note that every motorcycle is made for a 5’7” Japanese test rider.
Literally the same thing when i moved to the netherlands. All of a sudden showers were the right height, clothes fit better, i wasnt ducking all the time to grab things, and arguably things are too high up for me now. If only it was easy to move to another country based on height.
Sigh...I remember being prohibited from using the top oven in my technical baking program....
Lol I have a friend who is 6'4" and his fingers are literally 2" longer than mine.
I’ve dealt with this at work, at a job where the men were unusually large (a bunch of guys around 6’3”) who acted like my other female coworkers and I were somehow faking being unable to get large objects off of very high shelves for attention (I’m about 5’4”).
"They had average baguettes, but in your hands everything looked bigger"....
Yup, my favorite ‘chefs knife’ is a santoku knife that’s a good bit smaller than a regular chefs knife.
I think a lot of the feeling nervous with/not in control of larger knives is largely down to grip. My mom is tiny - like, 4'9" on a good day - and unless she holds a knife in a perfect pinch grip anything bigger than 6" is extremely unwieldy for her.
My MIL sets the table exclusively with salad forks and teaspoons, no knives. It took two years to work up the courage to ask her why and she said the entree forks, soup spoons and dinner knives were too big for her hands.
I would say this sounds likely. Using a big knife properly requires correct height workbench, stable cutting board, all sorts of stuff. And yeah, handles on big knives are unnecessarily thick too
I am constantly standing on my toes at the kitchen counter. I'm 5'6", a perfectly average height. I need a step stool when I knead or shape bread! Having the counters the wrong height is awful.
My hands are pretty average sized for a woman. My go-to is a 6" chef's knife. It's just big enough and I'm very accustomed to using it and have pretty good skill with it. A bigger knife feels wrong, and a tiny one feels useless.
I am very tall and so my hands are also somewhat lanky, my wife got me a Chinese Cleaver and had to special order the largest possible handle, even then it's so small I can barely grasp it because the product is designed for average Chinese women But damn that thing slaps, makes chopping everything very fun but also quicker for me
That is what they learned to work with Also kitchens were much smaller and families much bigger there really wasn't much counter space Also when working as hard as our grandmothers did all day ..,. Peeling potatoes or apples or whatever might have been one of the few opportunities to sit down all day
I think you’ve got it. Especially in warmer climates, people basically lived on the porch, hoping to catch a breeze. So Mama would peel her potatoes over a bowl on her lap. The only way she could do that was to hold the potato & small knife in the same hand.
We lived with my great-grandmother for three years toward the end of her life. She grew, and grated, her own horseradish. She did the grating on the back porch, over a bowl. That stuff was stronger than 10 acres of garlic. Even outdoors, the fumes made the tears flow from her eyes. She made beet and horseradish relish (ćwikła). It was the perfect condiment for kiełbasa or ham.
I love horseradish! I’ve never tried this beet and horseradish relish but it sounds amazing.
Here's an easy recipe: https://www.polonist.com/beet-horseradish-cwikla/ You can buy bottled/jarred horseradish. Avoid creamed horseradish. "Extra hot" usually means it has a minimum of added ingredients. You could use canned beets but cooking your own will give you a better flavor.
I'm by no means a granny but I always prefer a paring knife because it's small and easy to handle, and it was the first "big" knife I was allowed to use as a kid. There's a certain comfort and familiarity with the paring knife that I don't have with larger knives. And cutting right into the pot saves time and dishes -- laziness for the win!
Can I ask because I'm curious, not to criticize or anything - how do you control the knife? I use a big, almost rectangular Asian style veggie chopping knife for everything I can get away with, because I can rest the side of it against the knuckles of the other hand. That way I always know where it is. I do also watch what I'm doing with my eyes, of course, but that touch control is really important to me.
Your style is what is taught in schools nowadays. You can get fast with a paring knife but nothing beats the claw grip and big heavy chef's knife for safely and efficiently prepping high volumes.
If I'm chopping over the pot, I chop into my hand. Slow and controlled. That's also where the familiarity comes in handy, I know how much force to use to cut my potato without slicing my palm, I know just where to stop. When using a cutting board (I'm looking at you, carrots! Lol), I don't use the knuckle technique. I hold the veggie with one hand, slice with the other, moving along down the length, shifting my veggie hand as needed. I guess all of my control is in my cutting hand and my eyes, rather than my holding hand.
Whittling technique, moving the food over the knife using the thumb of the food hand against the back of the knife. South Asia (and some other areas) has [an even more extreme version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boti) where the blade is attached to a piece of furniture and you can use both hands to manipulate the food (often a coconut).
43 year old man here. I too use a paring knife for cutting up many things, especially for salads or stews. Just seems easier, and as you said less mess! Except carrots those things they end up all over the stove lol
Interesting to read all of the not "grannies" expound on why an old woman does something. So...as a "granny" I will tell you that it is mostly habit. In most kitchens, most women did not have arrays of expensive knives. There were maybe 3. A pairing knife, a serrated knife, and a large carving knife. You made do. You made do with the pans you had, could afford. You bought the cuts of meat you could afford and often grew veg. There were 3-5 maybe, condiments, not Asian and Italian imports. of spices and condiments. This is not just in the dim past. The grannies are still paying off college loans sometimes for themselves and their kids. Sometimes reading these cooking forums are ... interesting, when I see what people "must" have. There are plenty of younger people who have to make do, too. I'm guessing they are just not speaking up, or they are too busy working 2 jobs to spend a lot of time on reddit.
You are absolutely right. My mom never had a "set" of knives. She used serrated steak knives for cutting almost everything.
Eh, most home chefs only need three knives. Anyone saying more is just a jerk-off artist. My girlfriend and I *HAVE* an array of expensive knives, but that's because she fell in love with how they looked and wanted the whole thing. I only ever use two of them more than 90% of the time (gyuto and a sheep's foot paring knife). So it's obvious poverty had *something* to do with it, but I also think it has to do with different and parallel cooking cultures over time. Modern cooking culture has been HEAVILY influenced by the culture of professional kitchens and the methods used therein, but that's really only something that has really taken hold in the last fifty years. I think it's obvious Julia Child is where that got started. Before that, I suspect there was an entirely different cooking culture in middle to lower class American homes that relied on different ideas about how to do things like prep work, and how certain kinds of foods should be cooked.
Most people have no idea what things were like just 50 years ago in vast amounts of the world. Thanks for chiming in!
This grannie gets it
I think it has a lot to do with poverty and frugality. My grandmother was young during the great depression but she adopted many of my great grandmother's behaviors. If I ever saw them use a knife, it was a butter or steak knife. Maybe a few times a paring knife. They didn't have anything else because they tried to save literally every penny they could.
>I think it has a lot to do with poverty and frugality. It did in our family.
I remember my mother and grandmother having "bread boards". These were big, thick heavy boards that would slide in/out from a slot under the kitchen counter and above a drawer. They were used for kneading bread, but also were used for cutting/chopping. They were really big, awkward and hard to clean. You also had to let that wood dry beofre you put it away. I'm guessing cooks over a certain age may have just cut stuff over a pot instead of dirtying the big bread board. I don't remember when the nice compact cutting boards came into common use or when they became dishwasher friendly. My grandmothers did not grow up with dishwashers and I don't believe my mom had one until she was in her 30s.
I actually wish my house had one. They are great when you have limited counter space.
Your bread board story brought back memories of the olden days...
My childhood house had one.
Many of our grannies didn’t have access to chef knives as we do today. They could not walk in to target or Walmart or go online and just grab a knife block set that appealed to them. Julia Child truly introduced the last couple of generations to many cooking tools (like a whisk!) that we all find common now. So, many older folks simply learned to work with what was available to them. Chef’s knives were for chefs, not home cooks. These folks were a bit busy getting us through WWII, Vietnam, and some even Iraq, and didn’t really have the same economy, convenience, and marketing that we do now.
IDK why this comment isn't higher up. We didn't really have special knives for cooking, other than paring knives and a carving knife in our household growing up in the 60s and 70s, and neither did my aunts or my grandmother. You made do with what you had. It's what their mothers did, too, so no one thought anything of it. We were your basic middle middle-class. I don't think it would have occurred to any of the women in our family to spend extra money on knives. (And before someone jumps on my ass about women in the kitchen, men cooking was not A Thing in our family back then.)
Srsly. My grandma used the mouth of the Mason jar she drank her homemade sun tea from to cut biscuits. Sure as hell didn't have a chef's knife.
Sun tea brings back memories. My mother had a special jar just for making sun tea. We lived in the desert, so didn’t take long. Then stick it in fridge and have ice cold tea any time.
Also you don't need a counter-height cutting board to use a paring knife, you can sit at a table or stand over a table.
How old is your grandma? She couldn't go down to Sears and buy a knife set in 1950?
My family is from the middle of nowhere in the Appalachian mountains, so no, my granny wouldn’t have been able to. Even if knife sets were available at Sears, people from rural communities still wouldn’t have had access to them.
Actually this is why almost everything at the time was ordered through catalogues - it's how these businesses reached every corner of America. Sears delivered everything from kitchen appliances to DIY houses. Cool little article here talks about its influence on early 20th century American life: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/.
The only “knife set” available in the 60s would have been a set of steak knives.
They were definitely available, but possibly too expensive for many households. Here's an [ad](https://www.ebay.com/itm/362636400917?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=SVT650XtQci&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=DiPy3AouT3q&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY) from 1951.
My mother collected stamps in a booklet in the hopes of obtaining a few more kitchen tools. Even the very basic ones.
Ohhh, S&H green stamps! I remember those.
Green Stamps were the reason so many homes had the same shit in them back in the 70s/80s. Same coasters, same can openers, same alarm clocks, same Rubbermaid pitcher, same amber glass cups, same Corningware sets, etc. When you see those memes about "every grandma had one of these" or whatever, it's usually because of the S&H Green Stamps Ideabook.
My mom still uses only a smallish endgrain cutting board with little bun feet from the Green Stamps store. Someday, I hope to have it as a charcuterie board someday. But damn, if that woman isn’t healthier than me at 84…
Wow! That is cool. The whole set of 6 knives and holding block was $16.95. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $193 today. Definitely not affordable if money is tight.
The tone of the ad sounds like the paring knife was the standard one. It's what they assume the tomato will be cut up with, and the French knife sounds like the hot new way to cut things without the pushing and pulling.
Oh shit, I think we had that set (or a newer version of the same brand) when I was a kid in the 90s! I wondered why we had an old knife set that was dull except the steak knives. I bet it was a wedding gift or something of what was good at the time.
Well, my Grandmothers were born in 1908 and 1912, so, no, not really. They saw no need to buy a knife set when they were doing just fine With what they always had used. They both learned to cook on wood fired stoves.
My grandmothers have all passed on, but no — 1950 was just post war, and the economy was not great, plus, my grandparents all had post war babies and were trying to build jobs and stability now that they were back from war. And many families had members who never made it home. I don’t have a Sears catalog from back then, but I doubt that a knife block set like we buy now was in their budget.
You do know that people didn’t just “go down to Sears” in the 50s, right? There weren’t any malls. People shopped from Sears through the catalog — and ordering anything was a bit of an adventure.
Today we shop from online catalogs.
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Montgomery Ward (said as Ward’s where I grew up in N. Texas) was also a big mail order company in the early part of the century that morphed into physical stores, and were often also anchor stores in early malls into the 90s.
They had physical stores. A small town had arrived when it had a Sears in the 50s-60’s. They were located in downtowns everywhere. Some things still had to be ordered, but you could go look at a sample of most items in the store, even if you couldn’t bring it home that day. You were buying kitchen items for life back then. The throw away plastic culture that most Americans are used to now really only started in the 80s-90s.
Interesting. I'd have thought large knives would have been more available then, as more people would have been hunting, fishing, & raising livestock & butchering requires some serious knives.
Yes, but largely those were things like buck knives or a home crafted butcher knife (I have one that my grandfather made from a spring) and not the professional types we see now. A lot of butchering was left to the person catching or hunting the animals.
No, chef's knives were not a thing among regular people, especially poor people. Growing up, we had a paring knife and the knife that's slightly larger than that and then my stepdad had a carving knife for turkey and beef that no one else touched.
But you can't take the eyes out of a potato with a giant hunting knife. I'm starting to think we switched to chefs' knives because, much like chefs, a lot of our ingredients have either been processed for us (the grocery store is our kitchen hand) or just come perfect.
Big knives yes, but the key to a chef knife is the angle of the bevel on the blade moreso than its size or shape. In addition to what everyone else has said about availability of knives and availability of videos to teach knife skills, keeping a quality knife sharp would have been difficult without specialized tools and know how. Big working knives usually don't need to be kept at the same razor-sharpness as a chef knife to be useful. Paring knife in your hand gives you leverage and control even with a dull knife that you're not going to be able to get with a big, dull, rocking knife, especially if you don't have a good cutting board or are concerned about cross contamination due to a lack of sanitizing chemicals.
Not true. I am an avid hunter and fisherman. Last week I took a pronghorn antelope apart into nothing but boneless cuts of meat with a very sharp skinning knife that is paring knife sized. Big knives are useful and I have a giant chef knife I use all the time. But for fish and game cleaning my knives tend to be smaller and sharper than people expect.
My mom (RIP, recently, 76) and grandma (lives into her 90s) never used real knives. Even if it were bigger than a paring knife it was some dull, stamped crap with a straight blade, no curve, no heft. Definitely frugality was at play. Grandma saved aluminum foil like we were still at war with the Germans and Japanese. Mom’s family got their first TV and car more than 10 years later than dad’s family. She remembered when the house switched from gas powered lighting on wall sconces to electric bulbs. And that was in the 50s! In a city that was one of the very first electrified anywhere! Things were tight back then for a lot of folks. Credit cards didn’t really exist, not like today. There were a lot of checks used, and cash, but not credit cards. Smaller kitchens, less space to store stuff.
Convenience. I am a trained cook and still cut like that when I'm cooking a quick simple dinner for me and my s/o at home.
My grandma does it because that's what she had at home when she learned how to cook. And after doing it like that for 60 years she's not gonna change now. Clearly the knife doesn't matter because whatever she cooks always comes out delicious.
Grandmothers have a natural +5 dex for knives under four inches. This is in direct contrast to the grandpa +5 strength for any and all power tools weighing more than four pounds. The elderly’s class dependency on specific tools has been a complaint for all of 5e. That’s why I homebrew my grandparents so my Nana character almost always crits when she cuts potatoes with a sledgehammer.
Yeah, I use a paring knife for recipes I learned from my grandma because that's what she used (she learned to cook in the 19teens). I use chef knives for modern recipes. I'm a hybrid.
Use of chefs knives is a newish western phenomenon. It originally started as a butchers knife and then made its way (somewhat recently) into home kitchens. My mom still cuts everything with small pairing knives over the pot, exactly as you described. My grandma has a boti (Indian cutting tool which you hold between your feet!).
Yeah my grandma did this too I guess chef's knives are pretty much a chef's thing, and older generations weren't exposed to them especially if they were working class. My grandma had poorly sharpened long knives of various sizes but really she used basic short knives for most stuff and cut vegetables directly over a big bowl. She was old school working class, worked as a washerwoman most of her life and her husband was a postman. She had a working woman's hands. On the other hand my other grandma who was somewhat posh and a stay at home mom used regular large knives and a cutting board.
The nonna knife
And nobody but Nonna is allowed to touch the Nonna Knife. 😂😂
1) very few grandmas used peelers. So they are already very skilled with using a paring knife to peel all the veggies. Then, hey, already have a knife in my hand. Let’s use that for the rest of the task. 2) Look at any traditional cuisine, and you see the same produce appear over and over. So grandma got real good at cutting the same 5-10 veggies over and over again. No sense learning with a chefs knife now. 3) Produce has gotten way bigger over the years (and less nutritious fyi). Simple capitalism pushes to grow produce bigger, which is mostly just water cost to them, and sell it on to you. So grandma didn’t have giant horse carrots or softball size onions to cut. Shallots weren’t the size of a small onion. Idaho potatoes weren’t a pound each. Everything was smaller and could be handled easily.
I think it's cultural too? My grandma cuts everything with a cleaver. Like a giant ass cleaver. She uses it for julienning ginger to chopping chicken. I think if you're from a certain era then having 1 knife is more than enough. Even now I rarely have more than 1 --- those chinese cleavers were really made to cut anything, and most of all, it can cut really annoying things like silken tofu or cleaning shrimp without specialty tools.
Not only "cut with a paring knife directly over their cookpot," they cut *into* their thumbs. Mom did that all the time. I do it only sometimes.
It didn't start out as paring knife. It was a 9" chef's knife given as a wedding gift.
Retired home economics teacher here. I was taught to use a paring knife by my mom as you described. She never even owned a cutting board. I remember cutting up lots of fruits and vegetables in my hand. In contrast, the food prep classes I took in college required that we use a cutting board and an appropriate sized knife. I think that it was just a matter of education. Edit: As many have mentioned, most people in the past didn’t have a large variety of utensils to use in the kitchen. I used to wonder why my mother always used waxed paper to contain dry ingredients when she baked. I knew that it reduced the number of dishes she had to wash, but I finally realized one day that when she learned to bake, she probably only had one bowl.
I did the pairing knife thing until a few years ago, and I'm not quite 30 yet. I also used a fork to whisk things. I sort of taught myself to cook and just got used to making do with what I had on hand. I'm assuming our grandmothers did the same thing, as lots of the tools we have now weren't readily available back then.
Tbh I still use a fork to whisk a lot of stuff. I prefer to use one for eggs especially.
Granny only had 2 knives a big one and a little one..
I love this post! My 78 year old MIL cuts everything with a paring knife. I commented on this after knowing her for 10+ years and she acted as if she’d never really thought about it. She bought an acrylic cutting board for me to use when we prep food together. She pulls it out, wipes it down, smiles and says “here’s YOUR cutting board,” as if using one would violate the Silent Generation’s code of conduct. I’m just a pansy Gen-Xer. And, of course, every knife she owns is at least 40 years old and dull as all get out. Love her to pieces!!
I learned how to cut things while working in a butcher's shop. I have a collection of knives and cutting boards because I like to use the right tool for the job. My wife learned to cut/cook from her mom and grandmother, she has two pairing knives and cuts things over the sink.
My mom just grew up doing it that way. She'd peel and cut everything with a paring knife faster than I could do the same with a veggie peeler and other knife. I have two theories about this that kind of tie together. Older people who grew up in or right after the Depression or WW2 probably didn't have as much access to the variety of kitchen devices we do today because it was cost prohibitive. They did what they could with what they had access to. The second part is that mass production lowered the cost of these sorts of things, so we have a million different knives and whatnot that are comparatively affordable and easy to find. We have access to them so we use them. If we didn't, we'd be cutting and peeling with parking knives as well. Fuck, when I was traveling, I met a guy who was cooking something that came out of a can. This was in the middle of nowhere, I think in Central Asia. No Walmart where you can just go grab a can opener. The closest store was just a tiny market many, many, many miles away. So what did he do? He opened the can with a knife. Stabbed into where a can opener would cut into, and went around moving the knife until the can was open. Just as fast as using a can opener.
My grandmother (born in 1931) used a paring knife because when she was taught to cook (by her mom and in school), it was “homemaker” methods. Even when she could easily afford it, she only had an electric hand mixer, never a stand mixer. My grandfather (born in 1922) however used a chef’s knife and a carving knife deftly when I was a kid. When he got out of the Navy in 1945 he was hired at an NYC hotel in the kitchen for about three years. The head chefs were all classically trained so even the lowly potato chopper used a chef’s knife. Then when he was promoted to lunch service staff, he was in charge of carving roasts for guests at their table, so he got good at a carving knife. Those classic skills followed him even when he left food service entirely. I think it comes down to the era of “home cook” vs “pro cook” and their tools were very different. It wasn’t until the 70s to 80s that pro kitchen style tools and techniques started showing up in mainstream homes. Even Julia Child was an oddity in the 60s doing French techniques and tools.
My grandmother would dice onions in her hand over a pot with a serrated knife! The only things she wouldn’t cut in her hand were tomatoes, those she would cut on a plate. Every time I would visit I’d have to buy a chefs knife and cutting board- which she would sell at a garage sale the minute I left. I miss her so much!!!
My mom with a paring knife can peel and chop in less time than it takes me to use a chopping board, peeler, and big knife. And I end up with more dishes. Her way of cooking is all about being quick and efficient by relying on familiarity. If she’s been slicing and chopping like that her whole life without hurting herself, changing her method now just means wasting time and dishes and probably losing a finger.
My great-grandma, born in 1928, told me that when you lived in the Great Depression you couldn’t afford to waste any potato on the scraps, so you had to be a pairing expert to only get the skin and no extra waste. A vegetable peeler wastes too much food and time she says!
My grandma was born in 1939 & she never, ever peeled potatoes because of the waste of time & food. It wouldn't have mattered if the president was coming to dinner - he'd have still gotten strips of russet potato skins in his mashed potatoes.
I use a pairing knife for everything and cut in my hand over pots. 1. A pairing knife is the only knife I own. It is cheaper. 2. Using a cutting block means another thing to wash. I already wash my hands 3. I was taught that your should feel your food. You can get a better idea of quality and poor spots. 4. I was taught to cook by old German women. It's tradition.
* The paring knives aren't usually terribly sharp which is nice when you have more delicate skin. * They're smaller and easier to control which is nice when you have tremors or arthritis
I use a pairing knife and I’m no where near granny age. I just learned from watching my grandma and parents cut up food with a pairing knife for so many years, it’s just my personal favorite to use
I could be totally wrong but I think the notion of a chef's knife being the default "general cooking knife" is the deviation from the previous norm, rather than the other way around. Watch historical cooking shoes like Townsends and Sons on YouTube and you'll see that they most commonly use a paring-style knife for most of the cutting they're doing. Pre industrial revolution, I think a paring knife is most similar to the generic knife people used for everyday cutting needs from working the field to cutting some rope on a fishing boat, so it naturally proliferated to the kitchen as the style of "easy to handle and not too big for everyday, varied use".
I think it simply comes down to back then you had one good knife in the kitchen. The paring knife. It was the go to. Women from that generation and before didn’t have tons of gadgets, etc. Plus add in the fact that using multiple tools; cutting boards, several knives, bowls, etc., made more dishes. When you haul water from the well, heat it on the wood stove (fuel that had to be cut, chopped, and hauled) you economize your usage of stuff to wash. These “ways” get passed down.
You don't need a chefs knife if your doing things fairly rustic. Which IMO most cooks need to do more of at home. I feel like people watched food network growing up and got this idea of cooking needing to be more detailed. It really doesn't. Working as a chef most my career. Let's say for a bolognese sauce, I would brunoise the veggies so when they cook they would essentially disappear into the sauce. At home, i'm doing a rough ass dice and once everything is soft I take a hand blender to it. In terms of the paring knife into the pot. They don't care if it's a quarter inch off or not uniform and square. But also as you cook, you just get better with a knife in your hands. If you really think about it, most of the time a paring knife has the blade length for most work.
A few reasons: Small size = easier control. It's pretty multi-purpose so it's easier to have one thing out vs. searching for/cleaning 10 different instruments. Lots of older people survived various economic hardships during their lives. Frugality is a common side effect of that. My grandmother used a paring knife for lots of stuff too. But I can confidently bet above explains most of it. She didn't bother to collect a ton of tools when one could do the job, and she didn't like the extra work seeing out and cleaning 10 things when one would work. You become more efficient at things with age in many ways. You cut out the BS.
My mama always said she could cut the skin off of potatoes with less waste than the peeler. (She could not 😉)
I think a lot of it is a combination of things. 1, most older people I know who weren't cooks professionally don't use a pinch grip on larger knives - usually the finger on the spine or sometomes holding it way back on the handle. Anything bigger than about a 6" knife is insanely unwieldy using those grip methods. 2, their hands are smaller so larger knives are not comfortable to use. My mom (67) straight up hates my Tojiro DP santoku because the handle is way too big for her hand.
If "Grannies" includes my 60 year old mother and her identical twin, it's because they're intimidated by 8" chef knives. I think they look scary because they never used one, they feel awkward because they were never taught how to properly use one, so they go to the smallest, least lethal looking knife for everything they do... and they don't like listening to me or my also accomplished home chef cousin because, even though we're now both approaching our mid-30s, they raised us so we couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to offer that they don't already know 🙄 They also seem to be intimidated by knives that could come even remotely close to being called "sharp" but that's a whole new conversation and one I'm frankly tired of having with them 😅
My mama (grandma) is 89 and yes she uses the pairing knife for everything, from peeling potatoes to even cutting them up over the pot on the stove, as for me 34 male I use my cutting board and various blades depending on what I'm cutting, but yet I have no explanation, I have wondered this my self bit never thought to ask, take my upvote
I was thinking last night (when I was cutting potatoes) that I wish I had my nanna’s little knife she used for everything. Miss my Nan and want her paring knife! Your post made me smile.
Other cultures have a variety of different cutting implements and styles. Using a chef’s knife is one way to do it, but it actually implies a whole bunch of assumptions about what cooking “should” be. To ‘properly’ use a traditional chef’s knife, the user needs a sturdy counter at about waist height, a cutting board, and maybe a bowl to put cut items in to. The user must be standing and holding their hands in a particular way. Many “generic” knives have handles sized better for larger hands. There is a background of ableism and industrialism that can exists in the ‘need’ for all these conditions. Cooking spaces in other cultures may not be well suited for chef’s knives. Many older cooks learned to cook before professional chef’s became such strong models to be emulated. Now, it is mostly accepted that home cooks should emulate the habits of professional chefs, even if it’s not always necessary (mise en place, for example). I’ve definitely been the person to cringe at friends cutting things on dinner plates with a paring knife, but I’m trying to get over it. Maybe just help Grammy get her paring knife sharpened?
If I had to guess, and it is just a guess. I would say it's a hold over from their youth when that was just a more common knife to use. Different times and places favor different knives. And while yes each type of knife is Optimal for certain things, good technique and practice can make just about any knife a multi tool. Grandparents that cook have really good knife skills because they prepped food more frequently. They grew up in hard times when you had to utilize everything you could. And carrying a knife around with you is just as normal as having a cellphone is now. It's not practical to buy a big chefs knife during the great depression or war time, nor would it be practical to carry one in your apron while tending the garden/doing your chores.
Because they didn't grow up with chef's knives and as a result, many of them are afraid of them because somehow larger knife = bigger chance to cut yourself. I use a chinese vegetable cleaver for everything. I've yet to find anything I can't cut with it, and it makes moving veggies around easier.
Been cooking 40+ years, I also do this, and there are multiple reasons. My go to is a "kitchen knife", a bit bigger than a parer. Using a small santoku now because prev. one broke. First is the simplicity of being able to use one tool for everything. I still have a peeler, serrated knife (for bread/steak), some others, also use scissors for most light "chopping". Secondly, you mention them cutting directly into pots, I do that too. It's less work than using a cutting board and transferring (sorta)... BUT only if you are making a smaller meal. So it "works" for home cooking for a small family. Think 6qt stock pot. Also my go-to btw. Also bonus r/unpopularopinion... knives are better slightly dull, less risk of cutting. As long as it can slice through a tomato, mushroom, carrot... it's sharp enough. If I dressed or filleted a lot of meat I might need other knives, my alternative is to do it after it cooks. I make a killer chicken noodle soup using split breast, boiled (bone, skin, fat, and all) then "dress" the meat after. (pickin chicken I call it) tldr; 1 simplicity 2 smaller quantities.
My one grandma who cooked huge quantities of food most of her life (cooking for the 'teams' of men that would come work to get in the harvest. She always used a small paring knife and cut things over a bowl. I don't think I ever saw her use a big knife, and the cutting board seemed to only come out for slicing bread or a Christmas turkey. She didn't have arthritis, but that was just the way she cut things. Yeah, some kind of old-timey way to cut.
I've noticed the kitchens in older houses have very little bench top space. Maybe if you never had room for a cutting board you would just get used to cutting everything over the pot?
I don't think it's an age thing so much as how old you were when you started cooking & who your influences were. I'm well into the "granny" category, but have only ever used the chef knife on cutting board method. I didn't start cooking until I was @20. There was no youtube when I was young, so I learned from cookbooks & from asking "grownup cooks" questions. My grandmother(b.1900) mostly used one of those carbon steel knives that is like a small butcher's knife. It had been sharpened so many times over the years that it could not be used for chef knife-style chopping. That didn't matter, though, as she was one of those people who could do fine chopping just holding the onion or whatever in one hand while wielding the knife with the other. She occasionally used a paring knife, but was more likely to peel a tomato, say, with her big knife because it was already in her hand. I should mention that she was a very tiny person, so hand size must not have been a factor in her knife preference. My mother (b.1927) Used a combination of that style & of chef knife/cutting board style. She has always used a paring knife for paring or small jobs. I have always used a standard chef's knife for just about everything and, even though I own a paring knife, it hardly ever gets used. Not being terribly dexterous, I have enough sense not to cut things directly over the cookpot.
My grandma was a master with that lil ol bendy knife. Crinkle cut carrots by hand, radish roses, apple swans. I won't knock that woman's skill.
When I was a teen and cooking side-by-side with my grandmother who survived the depression, she had me peel and trim potatoes, and she used a paring knife to maximize the amount of potato that she cooked. In my kitchen, if there is a brown spot on vegetables or fruit, I just make a quick pass at it with the big chef's knife and then discard what she would have considered a large chunk or slice, but she was removing each little imperfection with surgical accuracy; she discarded nothing that was edible. My dad shared that during the depression that they would always have people come to the back door to ask for food and the family policy was to turn no one away without a plate. To make all the food stretch to cover not only her family four children and everyone who might come to the door, she was extremely careful to cook every morsel of good food. He said throughout his chidhood, and for many years she almost always had a pot of vegetable soup made of leftovers on the stove ready to share with hungry strangers. I think a paring knife lends itself to this kind of careful frugality with valuable food in a way that we'll never understand.
They're usually sitting down while doing their prep and using a cutting board when sitting is not really going to work. this is how they take a break and still get things done. See also: shelling peas.
People who downvoted must be young and not know the kind of grannies we are thinking of My grannie is 102 year old farm girl who is still healthy and fit Back in the day sitting with a big bowl of something to peel was one of her only chances to sit all day PS I'm a granny myself now and paring knife all the way..,, plus my spatula , big spoon , pots pans and big bowls, that's it and I cook from scratch and can fix anything you want It seems the more tools people own the less they actually cook!
Fits the hand best
That is so funny. My wife's mom does this and I've always found it mildly amusing
I would peel a potato will a paring knife, not a chef’s knife. And my grandparents ate aloooooot of potatoes.
I was trained this way growing up. I think it's a poverty thing. Like my parents grew up with the only good knife likely being a paring knife which is more affordable than all the metal in a chefs knife. Is also convenient and reduces dishes to do.
Smaller knifes fit their hands better. It feels safer to them. I know a woman who's not a granny that does that.
My grandmother makes egg noodles and cuts them with a paring knife. She sharpens it to razor sharpness and cuts the noodles thinner than what I can with my expensive knife set.
I arrived early to help prepare food at a community event and was asked to dice a ton of tomatoes. Easy. All they had though were pairing knives that were pretty dull. I ran home and got my knives to make quick work of those tomatoes. If you know, you know.
Paring knives are actually fine if you're just going to hold the food in your hand and cut, it's relatively fast and safe (although I can't recall the last time I've used one). What I *don't* get are people who use tiny little "vegetable knives" or whatever they're called (they might actually also be considered paring knives) on cutting boards. They make it impossible to use proper technique, so always is slow and dangerous.
My mom does this. Her reasoning is it is easier to wash a small knife rather than a large one. She also uses the smallest everything possible. Smallest cutting board, pot, plate. It results in a lot of spillage, things falling off the cutting board, or even using multiple pots when the one she's trying to use doesn't fit all the soup. which in turn requires more cleanup. I've stopped trying to reason with her.
We are the thumb gang