Rosa Whittaker owns a No. 8 Griswold cast iron skillet she bought from an estate sale in Hamilton, Ontario, in March of 2004, for nine Canadian dollars. The seller, a man named Albert Pasco, had inherited it from his mother, who had inherited it from hers. He apologized for the rust along the rim.
Whittaker took the pan home and put it through the dishwasher.
The pan is still in daily use. It sits, at this moment, on the second burner of a 1998 Kenmore range in a kitchen in Toronto's Junction neighbourhood, waiting for the oil to come up to temperature for two eggs.
This piece is, in part, an apology to everyone Whittaker has ever upset by saying so out loud.
Cast iron is not a delicate thing. It is, by mass and by intention, the most forgiving cookware ever made. A skillet from 1908 still works. A skillet from 1928 still works. A skillet from 2008 still works. The continuity is not because cast iron is fragile but because it is essentially impervious to the conditions of an ordinary domestic kitchen.
What can hurt it: prolonged immersion in standing water, storage in a damp basement, dropping it onto a tile floor edge-first. What cannot hurt it: a squirt of Dawn, a green scrub pad, a quick run through a normal dishwasher cycle if you towel it dry afterward and put it back on the burner for two minutes.
The seasoning layer is polymerized oil, chemically bonded to the iron at the molecular level. Soap is a surfactant. It dissolves grease. It does not dissolve polymers. This is high-school chemistry, and yet it has produced a decade of internet argument.
Whittaker is not the first to point this out. Cook's Illustrated ran tests in 2019. America's Test Kitchen ran tests in 2021. Several food scientists, including Kenji López-Alt in his 2022 column, have done the calculations. The seasoning survives soap. The seasoning survives the dishwasher. What the seasoning does not survive is sitting wet on a drying rack overnight in a humid apartment, which produces flash rust within twelve hours.
The two real rules, then, are these: dry the pan completely, and store it in a dry place. The rest is folklore.
Whittaker re-seasons her Griswold roughly once a year, usually in early November, when the apartment is dry from the radiators and the windows are closed. She uses grapeseed oil because it has a high smoke point and dries quickly. Flaxseed oil, much praised on certain blogs, produces a beautiful initial finish that flakes off within four months in a working kitchen. She has tested this. Twice.
The method is unromantic. She wipes a thin film of grapeseed oil across the cooking surface and the exterior with a folded paper towel, sets the oven to 230 degrees Celsius, places the skillet upside-down on the middle rack with a sheet pan beneath it to catch drips, and leaves it for one hour. Then she turns the oven off and lets the pan cool inside as the oven cools. That is the entire process.
The pan should come out the colour of dark walnut, slightly satin. If it comes out tacky, the oil layer was too thick. The fix is to wipe it down with more oil and run the cycle again. There is no permanent damage.
On the question of which cast iron to buy: it does not matter very much. A new Lodge skillet, made in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, costs about thirty Canadian dollars and will outlast any cook reading this. An old Griswold or Wagner from an antique shop, properly evaluated, will cost more and cook approximately identically. The smoother machining of the pre-1957 American pans is a small genuine advantage; it is not a transforming one.
Whittaker has cooked the same two eggs in a new Lodge from 2019 and in her 1962 Griswold, back to back, in a controlled comparison she did for a piece in a different magazine three years ago. She could not tell the difference. Neither could the three other cooks she invited over to try.
What does matter is the burner. Cast iron is a heat reservoir, not a heat conductor. It heats slowly and unevenly and then holds that heat with great stubbornness. A small pan on a too-large burner produces a hot ring and a cool centre. The solution is to preheat for five minutes on medium-low, not to crank the burner.
Whittaker preheats her skillet for four minutes while she grinds coffee. By the time the coffee is dripping, the pan is ready. This is a rhythm, not a procedure.
On the question of stripping a rusted thrift-store find: a lye bath in a five-gallon plastic bucket, mixed at about a pound of sodium hydroxide to four gallons of water, will dissolve every speck of carbonized old seasoning in three to five days, and leave the iron bare and ready. Wear gloves. Wear eye protection. Do it on a porch. Whittaker has restored eleven pans this way and burned herself once, badly, in 2011, because she got cocky and skipped the gloves.
An electrolysis tank, made from a plastic tote and a battery charger and a sacrificial steel anode, will do the same job in about a day. It is more work to set up and faster to run. Whittaker uses lye now because she does not restore many pans, and a bucket is easier than a tank.
The most common mistake, in her observation, is not buying the wrong pan or using the wrong oil. It is being afraid of the pan. People treat their cast iron like a museum object. They will not cook tomato sauce in it. They will not cook fish. They will not deglaze with wine. They use it for cornbread on Sundays and put it back on the shelf.
A pan used twice a year does not season. A pan cooked in five nights a week becomes, after about eighteen months, the non-stick surface every advertisement promises and no chemical coating delivers.
Whittaker's Griswold, after twenty-two years in her possession and an unknown number of years before that, releases a fried egg without complaint. It also releases a poached pear, a seared steak, a batch of Sichuan green beans, and the cornbread she did, for the record, make last Sunday.
The pan is not precious. The point of the pan is that it is not precious. That is the apology.
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