There were a few seconds, immediately after the blade sliced deep into the tip of my left index finger and shortly before the blood began to gush, when I merely watched. There always seems to be a moment like this following an injury in the kitchen; a stillness, before the crisis management kicks in, when we are lost in bafflement at our clumsiness or stupidity or just plain bad luck.
In this case, it was a mixture of all three. My knife skills do not deserve the name. I am a home cook, not a trained chef, and I haven’t quite mastered the business of folding my finger tips under while resting my knuckles against the blade. I was shredding spring onions. I was distracted. Now I was injured.
The wound took a month to heal. Now I have a crescent-shaped scar at the tip. It gets to join all the other scars. There is the long, slug-shaped pale mark on my right wrist where it fried against the top edge of a very hot oven as I reached in with a spatula.
We assume these things fade with time, but I’m now made of older skin and bone; that one will be with me for life. There are the polka dots of multiple small burns on the ball of my left hand, caused by reaching in to get the oven tray. Now there is this new one.
Anyone who cooks regularly has these marks. I am not proud of them. I would be very happy if none of these minor accidents had occurred; if I were unscarred. No one should make light of potential disfigurement.
Happily, though, they are minor enough that I can now be curiously fond of them. They are my life in the kitchen, written on the body, the physical marks of someone who has diced vegetables and chopped onions, fretted over stock pots and poked at roasts, tasted sauces, deep fried and charred and blitzed.
The fact is that cookery is not risk free. It involves fire and knives. While the possibility of injury may decrease with experience, the likelihood of it happening increases because of repetition.
Behold the professionals. My friend Jeremy Lee, revered chef at Quo Vadis, has been cooking all day, almost every working day, for more than 30 years. “The marks really come out in the sun,” he says. “My forearms make me look like a zebra. And you look at them and go, ah, there you are.”
The great Manchester chef Mary-Ellen McTague says her attitude to minor injuries has changed over the years. “Once, they were a badge of honour,” she says. “If your finger was hanging off and you were still cooking, it was weirdly heroic. Now, I’d rather just be safe. But I do feel an affection for my scars.”
Clearly accidents happen. Such is life. There is, however, one risk in the kitchen that every cook I’ve ever discussed it with winces at the thought of: the mandolin. “Watching someone slicing on a mandolin makes me very nervous,” McTague says. “I don’t know a cook who hasn’t lost a fingertip to one of those.”
Lee understands why it happens. “Maybe you can’t find the guard,” he says. “So you go for it. And then we kick ourselves for just being silly sods and too gung ho.”
That’s how it works. We plan to make something nice to eat. Then the hand slips. The blade does its worst. And we know, for certain, that the mark of our highly developed appetites will be with us for a long time to come.
