Bjørklund Cheese Slicer

The Bjørklund cheese slicer is a small plane for the table. A flat, rounded blade of stainless steel, shaped something like a bell, is pierced near its base by a narrow transverse slit, and the edge of the slit is pressed down into a cutting lip. A short steel tang joins the blade to a handle, in the current standard model of plain beech. Drawn towards the user across a block of cheese, it lifts off a slice of even thinness, which rests on the blade until served.

Its inventor, Thor Bjørklund, was a cabinet maker in Lillehammer, and the debt to his own tools is direct: the plane's slit and blade, turned through ninety degrees and pulled rather than pushed. He applied for a patent in February 1925 and put the slicer on sale that year as the "Spar", a name that commended economy. The first had a curved metal handle in a rococo manner, ending in a cast scallop shell.

Thrift was the selling point in the lean years between the wars, and not everyone welcomed it. The dairies' sales organisation, fearing Norwegians would eat less cheese, is said to have urged households to throw their slicers away. Bjørklund opened a factory in Lillehammer in 1927 and fought imitators through the courts, a contest that ended when the patent lapsed in 1942 and the slicer became a common form, made by firms such as Fiskars and Brabantia.

The family firm made it for more than eighty years, latterly in eight or more models. After its bankruptcy in 2009 a Gudbrandsdal workshop took over the line, and the slicers are still assembled by hand at Ringebu from the same four parts: blade, tang, pin and handle. A cheese slicer is a type; this one is the original, still made by the lineage that began it, and still sold under its inventor's name.