A 10cm x 10cm wooden square with a large hole crossed with wire strings: it could be a tiny harp if it didn’t also have another set of 12 strings that cross the first, forming a mesh. Even so, it can be strummed with a long nail, the basic strum audible, if you get in close. Its actual purpose is for slicing puntarelle, the inner tubes of a variety of chicory called cicoria di catalogna or cicoria asparago (asparagus chicory). A late winter-to-early spring vegetable, succulent puntarelle, with its asparagus-like tips, or punte, is a popular salad in Lazio, so the basic, nifty and cheap square cutters (tagliapuntarelle) are common and easy to come by in hardware stores. And much as puntarelle migrates and thrives in soil all over the place, so do the cutters. Of course, you don’t need a cutter; a knife works just as well, only more slowly.
I also know several people who have made themselves a tagliapuntarelle, inspired by the larger cutters you sometimes see on market stalls: wooden boxes or frames strung with wire. Big or small, it is a fantastically satisfying tool, the crisp tubes of chicory cutting like butter into thin strips, or, if you want to keep the tips intact, puntarelle octopi! And it isn’t only for puntarelle: celery, courgettes and red pepper work on this tool, too; large vegetables turned into fat strings in two musical seconds.
