The Call of Cast Iron
What do hipsters, lumbersexuals, organic farmers, American patriots, mothers who obsess over their children’s food intake, vintage lovers, metal smiths, avid home cooks, cookware collectors and the 67 other micro-cultures I’ve missed have in common? Interest in pure cast iron. If YouTube channel views could be said to be a kind of social barometer, cast iron is currently one of the most “hot” items to grace a stove right now. People of all walks are re-discovering the merits of serious cast pieces as kitchen tools and the glorious deliciousness of a solid stew in a covered iron pot.
Today, fewer people than previous centuries have a kitchen stacked with iron pots. However, skillets, sauce and frying pans have definitely not outworn their welcome in our modern kitchens and continue to be the source of fascination and discussion among avid cooks of many different walks. Myriad types of people are simultaneously in thrall to this timeless metal cookware for their own reasons. Many people are scrambling over themselves to acquire old cast iron without truly understanding the difference between what they are holding versus cheaper pieces made overseas, much less why it resonates so deeply with us.
We connect with our “skillets” because they speak through generations and, perhaps, imbue our cooking with some wisdom.
Speaking of skillets, by the late 1800’s, skillets, sauce plans and frying pans were all lumped together under one umbrella called “skillets” regardless of the sides, bottom and leg treatments that originally set them apart by name. It should also be noted that the idea of “spider” skillets — those with legs — was a purely American term unused in other countries.
The old skillets, made in the 1800s by long extinct companies, are soft, smooth and thin — in part because of age and use — but also because they were machined after casting. The castings themselves were made in a finer grade of sand. The machining process is now considered far too inefficient and cost prohibitive to do en masse on the cheap.
On this point, it is also highly probable that cast iron, unlike its more ancient and equally tenacious metal partner, copper, has remained in our pantries because it’s generally less expensive than copper and therefore more available.
The most prized pieces today — really anything made before 1960 —have a good chance of being finished in some way, so checking the date on vintage cast iron may help you make a decision on whether the piece is something worth investing in. Most pan surfaces, particularly in skillets, were polish-ground using a stone grinding head. Milling, by contrast, was a more aggressive polishing by machine wheel, much like today’s modern computer-aided CNCs, and was designed to actually remove the metal before the seasoning process. Griswold, for instance, created a milled-bottom skillet for a period of time. Milling was not used as often as polishing, so one is lucky to find the circular milling marks or spiraled grinding marks.
Today’s sand-cast skillets are not typically milled or ground polished. They are still cast with the same process patented in the early 18th century. However, the molds used by the foundries are made of aluminum, and shaped to fit on the several types of processing machinery. The automation of casting still requires several bodies working to bring a piece into existence.
For starters, there is someone managing the furnace. Each type of iron requires its own charging furnace. This means that a foundry that pours both grey and ductile iron (the two are similar in terms of amounts of carbon, silicon and manganese, but their graphite structure and alloys added to create differences in tensile strength and elongation vary widely) need two separate furnaces and charges. It is unnecessary to use ductile or carbon/cast steel for a skillet; the properties that make cast iron cookware desirable are not changed by different grades or types of iron. The per-piece cost of ductile is about 3x that of grey iron, and while ductile has greater elasticity and wear resistance due to its nodular graphite molecular structure versus the more brittle linear structure of grey iron, these properties are superfluous to a stellar cast iron skillet.
After the castings are poured and in a semi-cooled condition, they are pulled out of the casting sand and left to finish cooling overnight. Once they can be handled, bits of casting residue is broken off and the gating marks ground against a wheel. They are then tumbled in a “wheelabrator” which does fine, rudimentary sanding of the rough edges. If necessary, remaining small burrs can be filed off by hand before a final tumble. At this point, the iron is matte silvery pewter in color and is completely raw.
Beyond the provenance of early American holloware and the different machined and milled antique pieces that can be found in online and estate sales, hoarded, collected and used by people in nearly all cultures, the next part of cast iron lore is built upon the care and seasoning. That is an entirely different discussion that includes polymerization, oil varieties, types of heat, and, like so many things, there is truly no right or wrong preference.
Cast iron has a life of its own, due to its own rich and varied history, which appeals to hipsters and organic cooks alike.
It’s the offspring of even older cookware — the earthenware pot — in its slow heating and long retention — which seems to prompt a visceral response. You can almost feel in your hand the technology and history that comes packed into the skillet you’re using, that what makes it at once quite new and centuries old is something shared among people around the globe.
That, my friends, is something to stew on.
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