Cast Iron Pots and Pans
I had a girlfriend years ago — well, she and her live-in boyfriend broke up over the care of cast-iron pots and pans.
Linda, my friend, was of the school that you never wash cast iron — that you never wet it actually — and her boyfriend was a sudsy soapy kind of guy who swore by steel wool. If they had had a dishwasher, he would have put the cast iron pan through the cycles.
“Cast iron pans aren’t meant to be sparkly clean!” Linda would yell.
What Linda did was carefully and thoroughly wipe down the pan with a paper towel, that way keeping it oiled and seasoned. Food didn’t stick with Linda’s method. Food did stick with her boyfriend’s method.
“Cast iron pans aren’t meant to be grease-mops!” her boyfriend would yell.
Linda would come home and find her favorite cast iron pan sanitized, draining in the dish dryer next to the sink. Her boyfriend would come home and find it nice and oily on top of the stove. Their arguments about what was, after all, Linda’s favorite cast iron pan, were the loudest, and, finally, alas, they had to part ways.
I have several cast iron pans or skillets as they are called. I believe they are also called spiders by some. I, too, love my cast iron pans.
I am more a combination of Linda and her boyfriend. I love the idea of wiping down cast iron pans and never washing them, but I also give in to giving them a good washing every now and then. I never was very good at making a firm decision.
I have one excessively big cast iron frying pan. It is so big and so heavy that it takes two hands to lift it. My daughter borrowed it for about a year, and when it came back to me, it had rust on it! Not only that, although the inside was impeccable, the outside was layered thick with I know-not-what gunk that I had to spend hours on scraping off with a knife. Apparently, my daughter scrubs the inside of pans and leaves the outside to its own devices. Well, who eats from the outside of the pan.
Don’t ever loan your daughter your cast-iron pan, or you will be sorry when you get it back.
We’re not splitting up over it, of course. It so happens, however, that Lauren will be moving to Chicago, and I will be moving to Argentina, taking my favorite cast-iron frying pan with me.
What is your past history with cast-iron pots and pans?
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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