‘ART THAT CONSOLES’: CUTTING EDGE

The first moleta came to this country in 1886. By the turn of the century, there were hundreds, and the Italian knife grinder was a stock urban image: a man in a battered hat standing at a street corner, sharpening knives for all comers on a pedal-operated grinding wheel mounted in a wheelbarrow.

The corner knife grinder is long gone, of course, but the moletas are still with us. They’ve moved their trade off the street corner and into the kitchen: today the knives used in many restaurant kitchens are owned and sharpened by descendants of the men with the wheelbarrows.

Paul Cozzini, a sturdy, open-faced young man was born to “the art that consoles”; his father was one of four brothers who came to Los Angeles from New Jersey in the ‘40s. Cozzini sharpens a knife the way a born Angeleno drives the freeways, casually but with a barber’s deftness. His customer territory runs from Oxnard to Pasadena, and as older knife grinders retire he buys out their old routes to expand.

Cozzini can sharpen knives right at the restaurant, but he rarely needs to; the vast majority of his customers hire him as a cutlery service, in much the same manner that they get their linens from a linen service. Cozzini provides them with all the kitchen knives they need, replacing the whole set every two weeks with freshly ground knives. As a result, his home shop looks rather like a warehouse with shelf upon shelf of duplicate sets of cutlery. He owns upwards of 12,000 knives.

Restaurants are hard on knives, mostly because of the ignorance or laziness of kitchen help who see no reason not to use a boning knife to open a pickle barrel. “I had one customer,” he says, “who used to go through knives at an incredible rate. One time I took him a new set and he immediately took one out back and whacked the blade a couple of times on a brick. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked him why, and he said it was because he needed a rough edge to slice bread.” Cozzini gently explained that there was a kind of knife with a serrated edge that wouldn’t oblige him to customize it on a brick.

Anybody with a stone can sharpen a knife, of course, but for generations the professional knife grinders of Italy came from a single region near the Austrian border, the Val Rendena. It’s a picturesque valley in the Dolomite Alps, which happen to be famous for their knife-like peaks.

Like many a picturesque area, the Val Rendena was bitterly poor. For generations, the villagers supplemented their income by sending out men every spring to wander the Italian peninsula as knife grinders, each with a young apprentice to knock on doors for him and a wheelbarrow-mounted grinding wheel (called argagn in the local dialect).

Times were always hard, but the unification of Italy in the 1860s made them worse because the province of Trentino, where the Val Rendena is located, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now there were trade barriers with the new country of Italy, and the resulting depression drove thousands to emigrate to the United States.

They were an unusual bunch. They spoke Italian but considered themselves Tyroleans or Austrians and didn’t settle in the Little Italies of the big cities. The moletas among them were especially clannish, with their craft secrets and an incomprehensible argot called el taron . They had their own knife-grinder’s folk songs celebrating or bewailing their life practicing “the art that consoles”:

Pedala, pedala, pedala,

Mola la forbes e i cortei,

Sul canton dela trentesima strada

A l’ombra dei gratazei.

(Pump, pump, pump,

Sharpen the scissors and knives,

At the corner of 30th Street

In the shadow of the skyscrapers.)

The new country was good to them. In 1910, moletas started using horses to haul their argagns , and in 1920 they moved up to trucks. In 1930, they founded the Knife Grinders Assn. to settle the perennial disputes about who had sharpening rights in a certain territory and to defend their common interests--for instance, against a Mafia attempt to take over their territories, which they defeated in the courts. They established the Columbia Cutlery Corp., now a major cutlery firm, to manufacture knife grinders’ supplies.

There were so many opportunities in this country that sons soon stopped automatically following in their fathers’ footsteps. A Louisville moleta’s son named Victor Maturi, for instance, changed the last letter of his name and moved to Hollywood. Today there are only about 80 moletas left, and most of them are in their 60s.

There are a few young men, like Cozzini, who keep up the Val Rendena tradition. Cozzini himself gives the impression you can’t be a real knife grinder if you don’t have Val Rendena roots. “Grinding knives is something you go through periods about,” he says. “Sometimes I love it and sometimes it gets me down. There have been outsiders who married into moleta families and went into the business, but it never worked out. I don’t think you can stick to it if you don’t have the tradition.”