Given the complexity of the art of cutting, you might expect the Chinese chef to have a whole armoury of fancy knives at his disposal. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The instrument of almost all this artistry is the simple cleaver, a hammered blade of carbon steel with a wooden handle and a well-honed edge. At breaktimes, the corridors of the cooking school were filled with young men bearing lethally sharp cleavers, dangling from their hands in the most nonchalant manner. For me, this took some getting used to. In the beginning, I retained my European view of the cleaver as a bloody, murderous knife, the kind of thing a psychopath or a triad hitman might use on a drunken rampage. It was only later that I began to appreciate it as the subtle, versatile instrument that it really is. Soon I, too, had a cleaver by my side at all times. During breaks, I sharpened it on the giant whetstone in the school yard like my classmates, keeping it keen. The Chinese kitchen cleaver is not a butcher’s knife. There are, it’s true, heavy cleavers for chopping through pork ribs or the carcasses of fowl. But the everyday cleaver, the cai dao or ‘vegetable knife’, is unexpectedly light and dextrous, as suitable for slicing a small shallot as a great hunk of meat, and used by everyone from the most macho chef to the frailest old lady. A single cleaver can be used to perform almost every task, from chopping a lotus root to peeling a tiny piece of ginger, and it’s often the only knife in a Chinese kitchen. The cleaver is not just for cutting. Invert it and its blunt spine can be used to pound meat to a paste for meatballs: a time-consuming method, but the purée it produces is perfectly smooth and voluptuous. The nub of the handle can stand in for a pestle, to crush a few peppercorns in a pot. The flat of the blade, slammed down on the board, can be used to smash unpeeled ginger, so that its juices permeate a soup or marinade. Best of all, the flat blade can be used to scoop up whatever is on your chopping board, and transfer it to the pot or wok.
Fuchsia Dunlop; Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China (S.85-86). Ebury Publishing. Kindle-Version.
