There's always a way round a problem....

Duck breast in plum sauce is favourite for Sunday dinner but for a couple of weeks recently I was cursing the fact that the meat was difficult to cut. It wasn’t overcooked, which would toughen it, so I began to think the problem was mine in that I was finding it difficult to handle a simple knife. It couldn’t be, I told myself, a trifle unconvincingly. But I wasn’t trying to cut trifle, was I, I was trying to slice through a piece of meat. It took a while but eventually I got round to wondering if our dinner knives were up to the mark. We’d had them for a long time so it could be that the serrations were getting a bit blunt.

I hunted out some old steak knives with wooden handles that long ago were relegated to the drawer of cooking utensils but, being the snob I am, I couldn’t see me laying those well-worn utensils on the table. The upshot, therefore, was a trip to the shops.

Of course, the fashion these days is for restaurants to supply HUGE wooden (or wooden appearance) steak knives, those that look more like lethal weapons than eating tools, and that’s pretty much what I saw in the shops. We visited the best store we have (where I live) that is noted for selling up-market products at up-market prices. It didn’t hurt to look, though, and that was how I came to find this:

Isn’t it a beauty? It’s a Sophie Conran/Arthur Price and I believe I read that this was a winning design.

Whatever, I love it.

And you should see me slicing meat now... it’s such a relief to know the fault wasn’t mine!

Hmm, maybe I should work on a complete overhaul of the cutlery drawer.