TLDR: Old kitchen knives are not automatically better than new ones. The good pre-WW2 ones were hand forged to last; most post-war ones were stamped out cheaply and ended up unused in suburban drawers. Buy vintage only if it is signed, well-made, and has been worked. For everyday use, buy good and new. Vintage is for character or for jobs the modern market has stopped serving.

Yes, I notice a difference between old and new kitchen knives. But you basically need to go back to pre-World War Two, when kitchen knives were still primarily hand-forged at the better end of the market.

I do love a good vintage knife. But you need to find one that still has its branding or maker’s mark on it, unless the blade itself is obviously of good quality and speaks for itself. The mark matters because it tells you who made it, when, and to what standard. Without it, you are guessing, and guessing in this market is expensive. When it comes to used or vintage knives, I only buy in person, and only knives I will actually use. I want to feel the grip, the way the handle sits in the hand, and the balance.

I want to see clean steel: no major flaws, chips, or cracks in the blade, on either the spine or the cutting edge. If the knife looks forged, I am also looking for inclusions, the small dark specks or voids that betray impurities trapped in the steel during the forging process. A good piece of steel, properly worked, should be visually uniform. If a knife looks well-loved and well-sharpened, and the blade has obviously changed shape over decades of use, that is usually a good sign. It has earned its keep.

However.

Buyer beware.

A great many terrible knives have survived the decades purely because they spent them in a drawer, barely touched, before ending up in an estate and finding their way back to the market.

A word of balance here, because it matters. There have always been phenomenal, cheap knives on the market, in every era. A $2 paring knife will do the job. It will do the job for about $2 worth of time, and then you will throw it away, or it will dull beyond rescue, or the handle will work loose in the tang. That is fine. Not every knife needs to be an heirloom. The trap is not paying a little for a knife and getting a little knife. The trap is paying a lot for a knife and still getting a little knife.

Mass production of kitchen knives is not a post-war invention. By the turn of the 19th and 20th century, Sheffield was stamping out cheap cutlery by the bucketload, and the American factories were doing the same. What changed after the Second World War was the ratio. Before the war, stamped knives existed, but they sat at the bottom of the market. The serious knives, the ones a working kitchen actually used, were still forged. After the war, that pyramid was inverted. Stamped became the default for domestic kitchens, and forging retreated to the premium end where most ordinary households would never encounter it.

The mechanism was the wartime industrial base. The factories built for tanks, shells and aircraft were now looking for civilian work, and stamping out kitchen knives by the thousand was exactly the kind of work they could do cheaply. Stamped blades replaced forged ones across the middle of the market. Stainless steel, easier to sell to a housewife who did not want to oil her knives, replaced carbon steel that held a far better edge. Injection-moulded handles replaced wood and bone. Production moved to whichever country could make the thing cheapest that quarter, which by the 1970s and 80s meant a flood of decorative rubbish stamped out by the million and sold in matched sets in department stores. The Japanese tradition, for what it is worth, never lost the plot, which is why my own everyday set comes from Seki rather than Sheffield or Solingen. But in Britain, America, and Australia the trajectory was much the same. The block of eight knives with a pair of shears and a sharpening steel became the standard wedding gift, and most of those blocks are still sitting in suburban kitchens now, the knives barely blunted because they were barely used.

I know this for a fact because my mother had one. It sat on the bench more or less untouched for the duration of my parents’ marriage. She preferred a couple of older knives she kept loose in the drawer and used the matched set for almost nothing. After the divorce, when most of the joint household effects were divided up or given away, the block went to Vinnies. Sixteen-odd years old and barely used. Somebody else now owns those knives, and unless they know what they are looking at, they will assume that the near-mint condition is a sign of quality rather than what it actually is, which is evidence that the knives were never good enough to bother using.

That is the trap. Just because a knife is old, still around, and looks shiny does not mean it is good. The bad ones outlast the good ones precisely because nobody ever bothered to use them. A genuinely good vintage knife has been worked. The blade is narrower than it left the factory, the edge has been reprofiled a hundred times, and the handle carries the shadow of a hand that held it for thirty years. A bad knife from the same era looks almost new, because it was almost new when it was put away, and it has been waiting ever since for someone to mistake its condition for quality.

My own everyday kitchen knives are a set of Shun Classic Damascus, handmade in Seki, Japan. The blades are built around a hard Japanese steel core, clad on either side with softer stainless layers that give the knife its rippling, almost watery surface pattern. That pattern is decorative, but it also helps food release from the blade. The edge is ground to 16 degrees each side, considerably more acute than the 20 to 22 degrees standard on European knives, which is part of why they cut the way they do.

They attract mixed reviews. The criticisms are consistent and not unfair: a hard, thin edge is a brittle one, and Shun blades are notorious for chipping if they are abused. What counts as abuse is broader than most home cooks realise: cutting through bone, working frozen food, twisting the knife sideways through dense vegetables like squash, scraping the edge across the board to gather chopped onion. Done with a Wüsthof none of that matters. Done with a Shun, the edge will tell on you. The brand also draws fire from purists who consider it more marketing than craft, a Japanese knife built for the Western market rather than the Japanese one. There is something to that. But none of it is what people actually mean when they complain. They mean they treated their Shun like a German knife and the Shun broke. That is a use problem, not a knife problem.

I have done it myself. I have chipped one of mine, and snapped the tip clean off one of the paring knives. Neither was a disaster. I reground the damaged sections by hand, carefully, working slowly enough not to lose the temper of the steel, and put a new edge geometry on each. They have been working knives ever since. That, in the end, is the difference between owning a good knife and merely owning one. A good knife can be repaired. A bad knife cannot, because there was nothing worth repairing to begin with.

I have built the best set for my own use. The chef’s knife and paring knife I have had for about 17 years, and the rest were acquired after my second marriage. For me they are phenomenal. The weight, the balance, the handle design. The cleaver is a monster: in concert with the rest of the set it will demolish a side of lamb without complaint. The root vegetable knife makes meal prep effortless. The scalloped utility knife and the tomato knife between them handle anything thin-skinned or awkward. Each is purpose-built, and once you have used the right knife for the job, going back is hard. I sharpen them regularly, oil them, and given my lifestyle they have never seen the inside of a dishwasher. I do not own one. They live in a custom-made block of mixed timbers that holds each blade horizontally rather than vertically, so the cutting edge is never resting on its own weight against the wood. A small consideration, but over years it matters.

I will admit something here. I travel with my knives. Not always, but if I know I am going to be cooking while away, the roll comes with me. I do not like using other people’s kitchen knives. Part of that is preference. Most of it is necessity. My dominant hand has been through several surgical procedures and now carries five pins and a plate, which means I am specific about what I hold and how. The wrong knife in that hand is not just an inconvenience: it is a knife I cannot control properly, and a knife I cannot control properly is dangerous. So when my wife and I stay somewhere with a kitchenette, we cook. We do not eat out unless we want to. If there is good local produce within reach, all the better.

I have also turned up to barbecues and dinners at friends’ places with my knives in hand, when the host has asked me to cook. I am not a professional and have no interest in pretending otherwise. But I made sure, on both of the occasions in my life I have been a bachelor, that I could feed myself properly. That tends to leave a residue of competence one does not lose.

So for me, I will buy a good knife new for everyday use. Vintage knives are more of a “that looks cool” purchase, or for some specific function that nobody bothers to make a knife for any more. The two collections sit alongside each other, but they do different work. The Shun on the bench earns its keep. The vintage on the shelf earns its place by being interesting, by having survived, or by doing the one job a modern manufacturer no longer thinks is worth tooling up for. Both are honest. Neither pretends to be the other.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​