When I cleared out my mother’s apartment after she moved to an assisted living home a few years ago, I scavenged a few things from her kitchen: the palm-sized rock from the shores of the Indian Ocean that was used to grind spices, a set of stainless steel bowls, a wooden press for making string hoppers, a Sri Lankan noodle dish.
Her trusty knife she’d used for decades, however, went into the donation pile.
It was a steak knife with a black plastic handle and a serrated edge that had never seen a sharpener. You can buy a dozen of them for $23.99 at Canadian Tire. I think she’d had hers since the eighties.
Nonna Elda Sirizzotti's, 85, knife looks like it should be on display at a history museum.
It was a mom knife, a.k.a. a nonna knife, a.k.a. an amma knife. Maybe your mother, aunt or grandmother uses one to finely julienne carrots, to slice onions, to face off against giant heads of savoy cabbage, despite the knife’s diminutive blade and dull edge. Maybe you are a mom, reading this, suddenly feeling a little judged about your plastic-handled paring or steak knife.
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They are ubiquitous across so many cultures, beloved by their owners but often side-eyed by their owners’ adult children during visits home for the holidays. A friend described her late mother’s favourite knife as “criminally dull.” Another sent me a picture of one of the many $3 purple-handled paring knives at his in-laws’, calling them “the workhorses of my mother-in-law’s kitchen.”
Elda Sirizzotti’s nonna knife looks like a letter opener you’d find displayed under Plexiglas at a history museum, its matte surface mottled with rust and tarnish. And maybe it deserves to be in a museum: Its true age is unknown as Sirizzotti, 85, inherited it from her mother and brought it with her to Canada when she immigrated in 1966 from Italy. She uses it for peeling, slicing and chopping.
Elda (Nonna) Sirizzotti shows off her knife skills to granddaughter Alessandra Sirizzotti while peeling potatoes. A recent convert to the Nonna knife, Alessandra asked Elda how many she could peel while she tries to peel just one of the starchy vegetables.
She boasts that in the time it takes someone to use a Y-peeler to remove the skin from one potato, she can peel 10 with her nonna knife.
“It’s more fast. The skin you can cut a little bit better, you know? You don’t waste as much,” she says.
In 2022, Elda’s granddaughter Alessandra helped her start social-media accounts documenting her cooking, in which she shows off the versatility of her nonna knives (she has many – some old and some new). Between TikTok and Instagram, she has more than 650,000 followers.
In a video where she’s preparing minestrone soup, she stands over a stock pot with her knife, roughly cutting up zucchinis, leeks, onions, potatoes, carrots, broccoli and greens directly into the cooking vessel.
It's true age unknown, Sirizzotti inherited the knife from her mother and brought it with her to Canada when she immigrated in 1966 from Italy.
“You kind of get used to the touch of the blade almost on your fingertip. You know when it’s coming,” Alessandra, now a nonna knife convert, explained. “It’s a little terrifying when you think too hard about it, but don’t think too hard about it.”
If you search for “nonna knife” online, you’ll get ads for the Victorinox tomato and table knife that is popular with nonnas in the diaspora. In a cheeky Instagram ad for nonna knives by the Australian shop Napoli Mercato, a woman demonstrates how nonnas use them and says, “There’s your chopping board right here!” while holding up her thumb.
When my mom would visit, she’d wince watching me chop with my eight-inch chef’s knife and refuse to use it herself, longing for her “much safer” small, dull steak knife.
I don’t think she could bear to watch Toronto chef Wallace Wong at work. Wong, the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, holds several Guinness World Records for his knife skills. Videos of him rapidly slicing through garlic, bell peppers and tomatoes with his razor-sharp chef’s knife look like they’ve been artificially sped up.
When he was growing up, Wong’s grandmother and aunt were the main cooks in his eight-person household and they used a heavy Chinese cleaver for cutting through meat bones and mincing aromatics, and a mom knife (a steak knife) for peeling ginger and cutting fruit and vegetables.
That knife bore battle wounds: ridges melted into its plastic handle from being carelessly left on the edge of a hot pan.
These mom knives were such childhood staples that when Wong watched VHS recordings of Iron Chef with his dad and saw esteemed chefs wield large European or Japanese blades, he’d wonder, “Why didn’t they use our kind of knives?”
After attending culinary school, Wong worked in the highly regarded kitchens of Canoe, Momofuku and Langdon Hall and appeared on cooking competition shows including Top Chef Canada. He’s come to prefer Gyuto or Kiritsuke knives – Japanese chef’s knives – but knows it’s pointless trying to get his relatives to switch to using them.
“They’re like, ‘If it’s working and we know how to use it and it does well, why would we need something else?’” he says.
When Wong visits his family in Mississauga, he sometimes puts the heat-scarred mom knife to work. “I will use it to cut fruit after dinner, just for nostalgia’s sake,” he says.
Sure, it’s slower, less ergonomic and doesn’t do as clean a job as his go-to Gyuto would, but “at that point, nothing really matters,” he says. “It’s just sitting down with family and eating fruits and chatting.”
Soon after I finished speaking to Wong, my daughter asked for apple slices. My chef’s knife and cutting board were on the counter, tainted with carrot and onion juice from earlier that day when I’d made soup. Too lazy to wash them and fuelled by a bit of nostalgia myself, I grabbed a steak knife – a cheap one not unlike the kind my mom used.
Cutting the “night fruit” was the first kitchen task I was trusted with as a kid. No cutting boards were used: an apple or pear was held in one hand and the mom knife in the other, its serrations first snagging onto the fruit’s skin and then breaking through its juicy cell walls. Like Alessandra Sirizzotti, I learned how much pressure to use and when to let up so the blade didn’t exit the fruit and slit my skin.
The knife got the job done but I hated the tactile experience. I handed the bowl of apple slices to my daughter and then carried my cutting board and chef’s knife to the sink to wash them. In my house, the always-sharp eight-inch blade is the mom knife.
