THE "GAINE"
I can date my first encounter with the "gaine" to eighty years ago, in the spring of 1940, when Italy entered the war, a tragic event that I cannot forget, even though I had just turned nine. Although I was a young boy, I liked to visit my grandfather Pasquale's and my father Giannino's kitchenware warehouse in Via San Pietro all'Orto, a well-known side street off the central Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
The Medagliani warehouse was accessed through a nineteenth-century cobbled courtyard. The first room you entered was the shop, then the knife sharpening workshop, then my grandfather's plumbing workshop, and finally my grandmother Caterina's dressmaking workshop, where she and some young seamstresses made uniforms for chefs and the famous "toque", the headgear that symbolised the culinary profession.
The workshop that fascinated me the most was undoubtedly my grandfather Pasquale's, thanks to the curious, simple and somewhat mysterious manual machines used to cut, fold and round the edges of sheets of tin, copper and brass. Thanks to their efficiency and, above all, to my grandfather's manual and creative skills, moulds for sweets, pâté en croûte, vegetable cutters and biscuit cutters were made. I still proudly keep these objects in the warehouse, where they are displayed in some showcases filled with antique culinary utensils!
It was my grandfather who introduced me to two precious and elegant sheaths (Fig.1-2): one in tanned leather, the other in walnut wood, made by skilled craftsmen, to which he himself contributed by inserting metal parte. The scabbard, which varied in length, had five to seven compartments. The tip and the metal bands that decorated it were made of silvered alpaca, paired and decorated. The smooth metal button, inserted to facilitate the attachment of the scabbard to a hole in the belt of the trousers, was engraved with the initials of the onwer’s name.
The sheath was completed by the insertion of the essential tools of the cook's trade: a knife sharpener, a two-pronged fork and a few needles for larding and sewing.
After the war, with the downsizing of the kitchen brigades and the decline in the prestige of the great palaces, the sheaths disappeared along with the great chefs who were the faithful executors of Grande Cuisine.
They are now expensive antiques.
So that young chefs can see how this object has been a symbol of authority and professionalism for at least six centuries, I present some old engravings of chefs and their sheaths.
In the work of Bartolomeo Scappi, from the second half of the 1500s, on the page "Various Knives" (Fig. 1-2), there is a sheath that Scappi calls a "coltellera".
(Figs. 3-4) In the engravings from 'Of all Foods and Dishes' (1530), you can see a sheath tucked into the belt of two cooks.
(Figs 5-6) In 18th and 19th century culinary texts, there are many illustrations of chefs wearing the scabbard, so much so that in some of them it seems as if the chef is using the scabbard to emphasize the professional level he has reached - not just a cook, but a "chef de cuisine