Tedium - Never A Dull Moment 🔪

Today in Tedium: Obviously, knives, with their sharp blades for cutting through things, have been around forever—they’re a key ingredient of any horror film, slasher flick, or murder mystery that’s ever been created. But here’s a question that I don’t think a lot of people have pondered (mainly because they aren’t expected to like I am): Why do steaks get their own dedicated knives, and why do we shove them into giant blocks of wood for storage? And what about butter knives? What’s up with them? Tonight’s Tedium has all the answers to your dinner blade-related questions. — Ernie @ Tedium

Carvel Hall's famous steak knives—with the blades covered and the handles cracked. They're old! (Vintage Sailor/Flickr)

How sharp knives found their way back to the table in the modern era

Obviously, sharp knives never really went away—people in the kitchen needed blades with an edge to them if they were going to prepare food.

But what might be surprising to an observer is that steak knives, at least in terms of how we consider them in the modern day, aren’t old innovations with centuries of history. In fact, the modern steak knife didn’t truly make itself known until after World War II.

A device of simple design and surprising sharpness, the turning point for the steak knife came in the form of a reconstituted letter opener. That letter opener, designed by a Maryland machinist named Paul C. Culver in 1946, was originally a gift for businessman Charles D. Briddell Jr.

Briddell’s father, Charles Sr. was a man who chose blacksmithing over farming as a teenager, eventually turning his preferred career path into a namesake company. It was already a quickly growing company by the mid-1940s, with the company’s Crisfield, Maryland factory building equipment during World War II.

The company was also involved in manufacturing cutlery at the time, which is perhaps why the gift from Culver proved particularly fruitful for the Briddell family, especially after Charles Jr.’s brother, Tom, saw the delicate craftsmanship of the knife and realized it made more sense on the dinner table than as a tool for opening letters.

According to a 1953 article from the The Salisbury Times, Tom Briddell asked Culver for both a set of six steak knives and a case to put them in, then did a nationwide survey of the potential market. The findings were clear: People wanted an elegant, sharp knife to cut their meat, and they wanted it at home, rather than a restaurant. The resulting knife, the Carvel Hall, soon went on sale nationally—and became the first common kind of steak knife you could buy.

One early ad put the benefits of the $16.50 steak knife set as such:

Now you can do what famous chop houses do when they serve meat: Put a lovely steak knife at each place. The new Carvel Hall, worthy companion to the finest table silver, is a knife of sheer utility. Slimly graceful though it is, its long, tapering bald of finest steel cuts through the thickest steak with ease. Every home needs this smart steak knife set.

By the time of the 1953 article, Culver’s handmade letter opener had become a $3 million business.

Carvel Hall crab knives. (Dave Woodward/Flickr)

Eventually, the company, once named for the elder Briddell, would gain the Carvel Hall name, and (because it was a Maryland company) it would become known regionally for an ornate crab knife design.

But as the Briddell family aged out of the firm, the company did not always have things easy. The company, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, shuttered its doors in 1989 after its corporate parent filed for bankruptcy, but came back to life in 1990 after another company purchased the brand and reopened the factory. In an area with a low population and without a lot of manufacturing jobs, the reopening was a bit of a godsend.

"Carvel Hall will by itself represent a potential decrease of one percent in unemployment," Somerset County Director of Economic Development Tom Laidlaw told The Washington Post that year.

Ultimately, it was not to last. In 2000, the factory closed entirely, getting sold to an aerospace firm in 2004 but ultimately failing to keep its doors open.

The closed factory is giving the nearby community a lot of headaches as local leaders try to figure out what they can do with this massive building, with one suggestion that gained attention being the idea of using the factory to convert chicken manure into energy.

Eventually, the thing that won out was a redevelopment project for the company Element MD, which specializes in producing cannabis edibles.

Turns out, all the jobs that were once in knives are now in pot.