One of my favorite purchases in the past several years has been our collection of nice, solid, good, honest, cast-iron frying pans.
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Teflon and all the other fancy chemical surfaces that all these no-stick pans have on them. You know these chemicals have just come out of the lab, and can’t possibly have really been tested thoroughly for their effects on human bodies, including the bodies of children, including over the course of many decades (they haven’t even been around that long!), including when inhaled in the form of vapor as happens when the inevitable pan-burning episode strikes. Once a few years ago we burned such a pan and the whole house had a strange odor. I also remember the whole family got sick – my memory is not reliable here, I can’t remember the precise timing of when we got sick, when the pan was burned, etc., having only linked the two in retrospect – but it only added to my pall of suspicion over these pans. I had been using them a tad uneasily for many years – our modern world is one of many risks and many compromises, and you never can achieve purity from contaminants of any kind. Still, as I get older, I increasingly prefer the kind of contaminants that my great-grandparents dealt with and survived, and their great-grandparents, and so on. The contaminants that just emerged from the labs over at Dow Chemical or what have you, I’m a lot more uneasy about. Not to brag, but I am descended from a long line of people who, for thousands of generations and without exception, survived to childbearing age despite, in most cases, living in a sea of excrement and rot and disease. But that was 100% organic excrement and rot and disease! Actually, we can all claim such a lineage - it’s called evolution. Okay, many and often most of their siblings didn’t make it. And when I say they survived, that means only until childbearing age. After that, their fates varied widely but tended toward death between ages 30 and 40 – something I assure you I am mindful of, lest I be accused of a post-Sixties romantic, naiive-Rousseauian preference for the state of nature (an accusation to which I am already vulnerable due to my preference for barefooting. Let me assure you that I am a modernist in many respects). But still, give me bacteria over the next DDT any day.
Better Living Through Chemicals Iron
Anyway, the pans. So, one day I threw out all the Magic Coating stuff and switched to the cast-iron. They’re great! Many of the big chefs use them, I have since read, you get a little extra iron in your diet from them, and – get this – in terms of their no-stick quality, most of the time they work just as well as these spooky chemical surfaces. The secret is, when you wash them, don’t use soap! You just scrub all the food off them with water, but don’t try to soap away the thin film of oil or grease that is on the pan, it’s totally sanitary. Gee, people did pretty well with cast iron for a long time before Teflon, don’t you think? And if you’re cooking something like eggs and worried about the sticking, it’s simple – just cook with lots of butter! Turns out that margarine (aka pure trans-fats) is another modernist invention that hasn’t worked out so well. I know it’s been deeply impressed upon all of us that fat is bad and will make us fat and clog our arteries, but there’s good & growing reason to believe that there may be nothing wrong with good dollops of butter with your eggs, as long as you go easy on the carbs.
Right, right – the pans. The other thing I like is the simplicity, the weight, the solidity, and the classic nature of these big black pans. I know David Brooks would say it’s all part of the Yuppie quest for authenticity blah blah blah, but combined with the good solid rational reasons for cast-iron, I just love these things. And I keep expecting them to become an enormous trend and start filling the aisles in Crate & Barrel and Target, because usually whenever you really catch on to something, it soon follows that you discover half the world is right there beside you; but so far no huge trend toward cast-iron that I’ve noticed. On second thought, when I catch on to things, the world is actually seldom right there with me. Everyone still wears shoes, for example. Oh well. Wait, I know – it must just be because I’m just ahead of my time. Like when I swore off the car-based lifestyle in 1989 and moved to Manhattan. Because even then it had long been clear to the attentive liberal that our nation's investment in cars and oil was a doomed world-historic folly.
Anyway, the pans. They're great. They are heavy, though.
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