Doctor's orders

With a friend visiting from Andalucía we planned a weekend fiesta complete with crispy fried corn nuts, Murcian Estrella and big plates of paella.  As lunchtime neared we found out one of our guests would be late, but another assured us there was no cause for concern.  Andrés had brought red wine and jamón and with those provisions we could wait indefinitely.  When he retrieved the goods from his trunk it was not a package of sliced ham from the butcher that he carried in with the bottles.  It was a whole leg, from his counter to ours.  When he removed the kitchen towel draped over the jamón's cutting surface I noticed it wasn't a carved out curve but a straight line from end to end.

All for calming restless party guests, staving off hunger and
 imparting jamón-slicing wisdom to enthusiastic Americans.
But first, do no harm.

A doctor at one of the local hospitals, Andrés told me he sees a huge spike in jamón-related injuries around Christmas time, when patriarchs everywhere are setting out festive spreads for their families.  As he demonstrated, the slicing stance involves one arm dedicated to stabilizing while the other works away; it's all too easy for an exhausted cutting hand to accidentally jump its track and meet the other with full force. In order to avoid such incidents Andrés always notches out a deep right angle near the hoof, creating a vertical barrier to keep stray knife strokes at bay--a practice I was very thankful for when he handed the just- sharpened blade over to me.