12 Old School Cast Iron Tricks Every Appalachian Kitchen Used (I Still Do 4)

There is a skillet sitting on my stove this morning that my grandmother cooked in, and nobody in this country has made one like it since. Her name was Ada Sizemore. She fed nine people out of that pan, three times a day, in a house in eastern Kentucky that had no oven in it until nineteen fifty two. She did twelve things to that piece of iron, every day, for fifty years, and she never once explained why she did any of them. She just did them, and I watched, and I copied her without understanding a single one. It took me forty one years to work out which of the twelve were physics and which were habit. In this video I go through all twelve, in the order she did them, and I tell you plainly which four I still do every week and which eight I quit, and why. She heated it empty and she heated it slow, and that is the one that separates a pan that cooks from a pan that sticks. She put the cornbread into iron that was already hot and already greased, never cold batter into a cold pan. Soap never touched that skillet, not once in fifty years, and she was right, but not for the reason she thought. She dried it on the fire and never on a towel. She seasoned it with hog lard rendered off our own hogs in the fall. She scoured it with a fistful of coarse salt and a dried corn shuck. She put the grease on warm and then took almost all of it back off, which is the step I see done wrong more than any other and the one that ruins most first attempts. The skillet lived on the back corner of the cookstove and never in a cupboard. A rusted pan was never thrown out, it went in the burn pile. Nothing sour went into a young pan. A heavy lid turned that skillet into the only oven that house had. And the twelfth one is the reason I asked you to stay, because it is the one I had wrong for most of my life. I believed her pan was slick because of what she did to it. Fifty years of lard and fire. It is not true. Her skillet was slick the day it came into that house, because of how it was made and not because of how it was kept. The cooking surface was machined smooth at the foundry, and the plant that did it that way shut that line down in December of nineteen fifty seven. Three years later a French coating reached this country, and the year after that a million coated pans a month were going out the door. So when your grandmother's pan does something yours will not do, you are not doing it wrong. You are holding a different object. There is no money in a skillet that outlives the person who bought it. That is the whole story, and it is not a conspiracy, it is arithmetic. Tell me what the inside of your pan feels like, and tell me where it came from. I read every one of them.