How to Handle the Electric Knife

I came, I sawed, I—well, that was it. I sawed. It didn’t take but a second each time, which is the idea behind the electric knife: it’s a tiny power saw you slice your holiday roast with. You plug it into the wall, you pull the trigger, and it blazes through whatever has the misfortune of being in its way. Usually this is meat but, when the electric knife showed up in the mail, I had nothing larger on hand than an English cucumber, which I ate for breakfast on a cracker with some yogurt. The knife sawed it into slices easily, if a little unevenly.

The electric knife came onto the scene at a time of proliferating kitchen gadgetry—the sixties—reflecting a postwar fad for devices that would make domestic work a little easier. The knife excepted, these devices were largely targeted at women. For instance, a Toastmaster advertisement from the era promoted products like a toaster as “marvelous for Mother,” by which I assume Toastmaster meant Mike Pence’s wife.

And for Father? Well. There’s an essay in the book Stud: Architectures of Masculinity—look at its terrific cover—in which the critic, curator, and graphic designer Ellen Lupton digs into all the ways the electric knife was advertised for Dad, to make him feel useful come suppertime. Lupton’s essay is a model of what a subtle job a grown-up writer can do with a subject rife with subterranean anxieties about, uh, certain personal insufficiencies, which unfortunately is not the article you’re reading right now.

My electric knife, a Cuisinart CEK-40, came with two attachments: one for meat and one for bread, both of which click into a stand that sits on the counter. Each attachment comprises two blades that saw back and forth rapidly to cleanly dismember your cucumber. Eventually, you can graduate to something bigger, such as the loaf of bread I obtained from a bakery in Jacksonville, Florida, made of 100 percent rye flour and, therefore, not easily penetrable by the usual means. The electric knife made quick work of it. Whir, whir!

But bread is a sideshow, really. The electric knife, Lupton writes, was a ceremonial object, which found its zenith of popularity in the 1960s and 70s. It was brought out at supper for Dad to carve the roast with—to become, per one advertisement, “a Michelangelo at mealtime.” Though it must be said: Michelangelo also did some painting, okay? He didn’t just show up at the unveiling of the Sistine Chapel and throw some varnish on the ceiling.

The act of the man cutting the roast gestures back to a whole history of ceremonial feasts in which the labor of hunting and cooking was divided by gender, not unlike many of today’s backyard barbecues, where men man the grill and, having grilled, dramatize their suburban conquest by carving the beast there in the open, for all to see. In Europe in the early modern period, this was a spectacle indeed. The handler of the meat should display “staggering levels of skill, strength, and confidence,” Lupton writes. “To serve a roasted bird the carver was expected to hold the entire carcass in the air on the end of a fork, while with the other hand slicing off perfect slivers of meat that would fall in a circular pattern on a platter waiting below.” When I picture this I think of Salt Bae, the thirsty chef célèbre who became famous on the internet for contorting himself into the shape of a goose and seasoning steaks from the proper overhead distance.

I find Salt Bae’s schtick a little embarrassing to behold, like I’m watching something intimate that I shouldn’t be. So might Mrs. Beeton, I suspect. She authored a book of manners in 19th-century England in which she bemoaned the man who tried too hard, and came up short, when it came to handling the meat. Wrote Mrs. Beeton: “We have all seen him, offering in an emergency to assist his hostess, and trying with mere physical force to overcome his lack of skill; with red face and perspiring forehead he hacks and tugs at the dish in front of him, and at every attempt the veins stand out more prominently in his head, while the face of his hostess grows graver each moment.” We’ve all been there. Some days you’re the hostess, and some days, well...

In the modern era, electric knives do enjoy a chorus of enthusiastic recommenders, at least if you read food media: men who work in restaurant kitchens, people who are famously and definitely not obsessed with their—how to put this delicately—knives, and who like to use the power saw on things like Thanksgiving turkey, on account of it slices cleanly and doesn’t leave any jagged edges. You will find it promoted as effective on terrines, various roasts, even, in one Manhattan kitchen, on the traditional holiday turducken, meat upon meat upon meat.

So I decided to go out and get myself a big piece of meat, just to see what my little machine could do. Not too big—I’m single and this sure isn’t Christmas. The knife was otherwise just sitting there on the counter. I thought sometimes about using it, but plugging in a knife when you’ve got another knife right next to it that doesn’t require plugging in always seemed a little more rigamarole than necessary. But just so my electric knife could see some action, I procured a pork loin. I cooked it in the usual way. In my case that’s “accidentally drier than it should be, despite the fact you’ve been taking its temperature every 90 seconds for the last 15 minutes,” but overcooked or no, the knife cut through my roast like it was a two-pound log of butter. It was fun, and over all too soon. Briefly I understood the meaning of true power. And then I stored it in the cupboard.

One day I'll reach for it again. Because every text eventually escapes the aims of its author, the electric knife has been put to other purposes. For instance, lots of people use it on craft projects. It cleanly cuts through Styrofoam; you can trim a memory-foam mattress to fit your frame. You can absolutely murder a small wooden dowel. And we haven’t even gotten to my favorite part of the Ellen Lupton essay, which is when she finds an old 1965 Westinghouse ad making the point that Mother, too, might find some use for the electric knife. “After he’s had a go at poultry, roasts, hams, there won’t be any stopping him,” this ad reads. “And think what you can do with it when he isn’t around.”