If shitting gold or a roast that weighs more than the last three best actress winners does not appeal, there are some more reasonable ideas.* I stand by what I said last year, but would add a bit of a caveat by way of suggestion. Individually selected knives make better gifts than sets, and one way to make a single knife seem giftier would be to pair it with the new Peter Hertzmann jawn, Knife Skills Illustrated. Hertzmann has one of the more fully realized, yet slept upon food things on the internet. This book is useful, but it does seem like a case where the publisher's eyes are bigger than its stomach. There is an article or two like he does's worth of material, and then a lot of other stuff that pads it out into a book.
The stuff about choosing, holding, and using knives is useful -- imagine a world where Chris Kimball took antidepressants -- but the next 210 pages are how to cut individual vegetables and meats. Seriously. Here on earth, if you are unable to apply what you learned from cutting celery to cutting fennel, you probably should not be trusted with a knife anyway. To make matters worse, each item, mushroom, chicken breast, etc, is repeated for righties and lefties. Let's just say that the Cod has been shopping at the Leftorium for some time, and has, to this point, managed to extraopolate from the illustration to real life. I still have a hard time swiping my card at the gas pump, but the idea that the locations of the tomato and the knife would be exchanged, I've been able to suss pretty consistently.
All that said, the same things that make this a not-great value at $29.95 make it a nice gift -- while it is tough to figure buying it for one's self, but not hard to imagine wanting it for the stuff in the beginning. Paired with a decent kinfe, either utilitarian or fancy, it would make a nice gift for someone who has started cooking, and wants to get serious.
Comments