Peter Hertzmann is the author of Knife Skills Illustrated: A User’s Manual and the creator, author, and illustrator of the e-zine à la carte, which has been in continuous publication since 1999 and currently enjoys about half a million visitors a year. He also teaches cooking classes both in the United States and internationally. Peter’s obsession with knives and other aspects of la batterie de cuisine goes back to the early 1970s when he started his life-long interest in cooking and culinary traditions. For him, cooking is not just a matter of preparing recipes, it is a total immersion in all things food. As he writes in his e-zine: “I’m obsessive. All my life, when something interested me, I became obsessed with it. I learned all I could about it. I lived it!”

Peter learned his cooking skills not in a classroom, but by working in restaurants, many with a Michelin star or two, in France and Switzerland. Recently, he spent a few weeks in an old-time butcher shop breaking down sides of beef, pork, and lamb to better understand the process and improve his knowledge of animal anatomy. He is also an avid student of food history and cooking science.