The Chinese cook’s knife

Abstract

The tool used in Chinese kitchens to cut ingredients, whether professional or domestic, is of a single model: a wide, perfectly sharpened rectangular blade fixed on a handle. Difficult to use for a novice, it requires a real apprenticeship. But once this has been done, this cumbersome instrument, when compared to the knives used in French and Japanese kitchens, proves to be remarkably efficient. This tool is used to make a series of cuts of ingredients in very varied shapes using codified handling techniques. Cutting operations in the Chinese culinary system always carried out before cooking – with a few exceptions – are considered to be of equal value with the cooking process. It is often said that the use of chopsticks imposes cutting in Chinese cuisine, but this concerns several Asian cuisines. Chinese cooking professionals have developed a discourse on cutting, insisting on its role in revealing tastes, and incidentally on its positive role in digestion. It can nevertheless be suggested that the Chinese cutting system is a metaphor destined to visibly signify, even in the dishes, the extreme dexterity of the cook whose perfection of the craft can only be expressed in ephemeral works.