I can't imagine how this passed me by all these many years. Have you heard of Allen Hemberger's Alinea Project? It's a thing of glory. He ate at Alinea, one of the top restaurants in the world, the sort of place where food is magic, theatre, and gastronomic bliss, all rolled into one. (I've not been, but if any of my friends in Chicago want to take me there next time I'm over, I won't resist.) The experience set him off on an extraordinary adventure.

I don't normally get on the blog to babble about cookery though. Even though cooks get the best knives. So why now?

Simply put, Mr. Hemberger went through the entirety of Alinea's cookbook, 107 recipes (with 400 mini-recipe component parts), and blogged the whole thing. Then produced a book about it. This is so very much like finding the world of historical woodworkers I blogged about a while ago.

His blog is a tour-de-force in recreating a physical practice (and what is more physical than cookery?) from a book. The parallels with recreating historical martial arts from historical sources are in-your-face obvious.

The magic moment comes when he realises that the book is not perfect, that there are errors. He even includes a list of those errors (which makes me feel much better about the occasional typos or outright mistakes in mine). And the presentation is simply breathtaking. Even the search function on his website is beautiful and interesting. Go and search for something, I dare you!

This leapt out at me:

I’m finding that I’ve slowed down on the haphazard jumping around through this book, and am trying to pay more regard to the seasons.  At first I wanted to just attack the recipes that seemed most interesting (and doable), but slowing down a little is encouraging me to look more deeply into these things. This dish is the first one in the Alinea cookbook, and I think I’ve overlooked it specifically because I had no idea what “nasturtium” (which I pronounced in my head “nas-tur-TEE-um”) was, much less what it tasted like.

That is what happened to me around 2003, with Fiore.

Plus, the dude can write:

The one service Cloudy Bay doesn’t offer is shucking the clams. I’ll be honest, this part scared me. I had visions of shell residue scattered everywhere in the kitchen, nicked butter knife blades sitting in the sink, me crying softly in the corner, a sad half-mauled clam limping sadly across the floor like some sort of tongue creature, licking the floor and tasting my inadequacy.

I don't have the book (but I'm on the waiting list for the next printing), because the parallels are just too juicy to ignore. He has one gigantic advantage over us historical sword people though: his maestro, Chef Grant Achatz, is still alive, and so Mr Hemberger has been able to literally eat the master's original versions of the dishes he has so laboriously re-created. That must be like being thrown to the floor (vewwy woughly) by Fiore himself.

Clearly, Mr Hemberger is our sort of crazy. I couldn't pass this by without flagging it up in case you'd missed it. I have a feeling I might write more deeply on this in the future, but couldn't keep it to myself meanwhile.

In other news, the new podcast reached 1000 downloads today! Which is unlikely to impress the Joe Rogans and Tim Ferriss's of the podcasting world, but I'm very pleased that it's finding its niche (there will be another episode out on Friday morning; and I have another ten in the bag, so it looks like this project has legs).

I know you’ve been thinking about nothing else for the last few days. Not the pesky plague. Not economic uncertainty. This, and only this:

What the hell is that thing Guy made?

Dale Belcher, of Independence, Kansas, in the USA was the first person to answer, and the only person to get it right! Well done sir!

It is of course a till for hanging my set-squares on.

Dale’s answer won him a copy of my new book.

But it wasn’t the best answer. That laurel belongs to Vojkan Selakovic of Serbia, who wrote in with this:

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here, but it should be apparent that we are looking at a type of, perhaps unsurprisingly, anti virus barrier for historical manuscripts.

This is a semi-finished, though cleverly masked, DIY set.

In these dire times, we are faced with an increasing challenge of balancing between our health, our lives, and our need for analysing historical manuscripts*.

That is why a group of aspiring inventors…invented a DIY set for sword fighting instructors and dedicated HEMA practitioners. The current model, unfortunately, only cover Fiore manuscript dimensions, blatantly discriminating against other, lesser manuscripts. Something that will have to be addressed in the future.

So to give you a brief overview I will have to use an illustration found on the link provided [I took a screenshot. GW]. Keep in mind these are copyrighted, like, seriously, very strict and all.

View post on imgur.com

– Piece no. 1 is a plastic sheet/screen holder which is fixed to your regular book stand by a screw, or, if you’re really going for that authenticity – nails.

– Piece no. 2 is just a leftover part Guy Windsor put there to mess with us. It’s useless.

– Piece no. 3-4 are a disinfectant holder, a stand nailed to a side of the book stand. It holds your standard 2,5L disinfectant/hand sanitizer dispenser/bottle you probably have tons of by now.

– Piece no. 5 is a (cleverly) unfinished mock up hand used for turning the pages, pointing to a play, pushing the dispenser button, scratching the back etc.It needs a metal rod inserted into it, and provided are three rod holders (ideally all three can be combined into a 3m single rod for that extra level of social distancing).

Please forgive me for being a Captain Obvious here, but it had to be done.

Cheers!

*I hope it was obvious enough that this part was just a joke. Stay safe everybody, #StayAtHome, and stay positive (except if you are testing for COVID-19).

This was so clearly what I should have made that I sent him a copy of the book immediately!

In other news, I went on a walk to some woods outside Ipswich at the weekend, and for the first time got to see the bluebells in bloom. Previously, I have been travelling at this time of year, and missed them. 

Aren’t they glorious? 

For user-friendliness I’ve only uploaded a small version of the photo to my blog, but if you’d like the full size images  I've put them in a dropbox folder here. No copyright, do with them as you will.

Oh, you were expecting something to do with swords? Well, I’m working on a couple of things, but couldn’t leave you in suspense over that squares till a moment longer.

There is magic in sharp steel. The feel of a perfectly honed edge slicing through wood, leather, or other targets, it’s as if the thing being cut parts before the blade like the Red Sea before Moses.

I’ve spent my whole working life with blades, first as a cabinet-maker, then as a swordsmanship instructor, so it’s odd to think that I’ve never made one. Well, thanks to Sergio Muelle at Twisted Horseshoe Knives, I’ve now made three. Sergio runs ‘Make a knife in a day’ workshops at his forge in the Suffolk countryside, and I showed up on January 9th with a sense of keen anticipation. 

In the three months between booking the workshop and the happy day arriving, I thought a lot about what kind of knife to make- Sergio is happy to help you make literally any kind of blade that a beginner could reasonably attempt: he even runs a three-day damascus knife workshop. His courses are individual instruction, so you really can make whatever you want, within reason. I wanted a knife I’d use all the time, not something fancy to hang on the wall, so I opted for a cabinet-maker’s marking knife, in the Japanese style (kiridashi). Because this is a very simple design with no handle components, Sergio told me we would have time to make a pair of them, both left and right-handed. This is really useful, because in fine woodworking you often need to use one or the other for maximum accuracy. And in the end, we made three: one left handed, one right, and one with both bevels which can be used either way. 

Here they are:

We started with the basic safety briefing (fire is hot, the British government thinks that pillar drills are more dangerous than forges running at 1000 degrees centigrade, etc.) then I sketched the basic idea of the knife onto a sheet of paper, and we got started. The left and right handed ones started out as a piece of steel that Sergio cut out from a sheet with an angle grinder, and the middle one began life as a farrier’s rasp. 

Our first job was to bulk up the steel at the point end. We did this by heating it up, putting the hotter end on the anvil, and bashing it with a hammer like driving in a fence post. I say we, but in every case, Sergio showed me what to do once or twice, then I did it. While I couldn’t have done this without his guidance, I did about 98% of the actual bashing and quenching and grinding etc. It turns out that having two irons in the fire is way more efficient than just one. You get maybe 30 seconds of bashing time, and have to re-heat for maybe a minute. During that minute there is nothing to do, unless you are working two blades at once. So in terms of forging time, two knives take about the same time as one. 

Once the ends that would become the points had been thickened, I bashed the blanks into the overall shape, first drawing out the handle, then shaping the point and the bevel.

I also put holes in each handle for hanging on a nail in my workshop. This was done with a punch, cutting through the red-hot steel, then widening the hole.

As you can see from the end results, I got better with practice! The first one is very wiggly woggly, the other two much cleaner.

I also stamped the blades with my initials. At the end of this process, which took maybe an hour and a half, I had two knife blanks cooling down, and the third about half-way done. The two forged blanks were ready for grinding to shape on static belt sanders.

Here you can see one blank straight from the forge, the other ground to shape:

Then the real magic: the alchemical process of heat treating. I coated the blanks in clay, leaving the cutting areas bare.

I then dried the clay in the forge, before leaving the knife in there (one at a time) to heat up to the point where the steel glows brightly, and is completely converted to austenite. Then out of the fire and into the frying pan (or in this case, the oil bath). The rapid cooling converts the austenite to martensite, giving the steel the crystal structure that makes for excellent sharpenability and edge-holding. 

Oh my, that was fun.

We then took the blades back to the grinder and finished shaping them. I knew exactly what I wanted, and I’ve done a lot of sanding of various kinds before, so Sergio left me to it while he heated up the tempering oven and got lunch ready.

The knives sat in the oven at about 180 degrees while we had lunch. This takes the very hard and rather brittle blade and relaxes it a bit, leaving it plenty hard enough, but tough with it.

After lunch while the left and right handed knives were cooling down, I forged the file blank into the right shape for the double bevelled knife.

Sergio speeded up this process enormously by doing some of the basic shaping in the powered press. The file steel was much easier to beat into shape than the high-chromium steel we used for the other two. It didn’t take long before it was ready to cool down before being ground to shape, heat treated, ground again, and then tempered. While it was tempering I polished up the first two knives.

The time-saving element of doing several blades at once only applies to the forging: grinding and polishing takes ages!

I didn’t sharpen the knives there- I was getting tired, and I have a decent sharpening set-up in my home workshop. So far I’ve got the right-handed knife sharpened, and have been using it for woodwork and cutting leather. It is absolutely beautiful to use. Sharp enough to split hairs, solid and stable in the hand, with enough weight behind it that you need very little effort to get the job done. 

What a start to the year! Three shiny new blades, some new skills, and what is shaping up to be a new friendship.

If you are within striking distance of Stowmarket (Suffolk, UK), then you should definitely contact Sergio to set up your own knife-making experience. Feel free to share this with anyone you think may be interested!