Cleaning Cast Iron

Reflecting on cleaning a cast iron pan.

The other day I was scrubbing years of accumulated cruft off our cast iron pan

No I know what you're thinking, I don't mean the seasoning, let's just say some previous owners like to use it to pour out a lot of puddings.

. We got the pan on a whim at a vintage shop years ago for maybe $20; we'd never used cast iron before and I think my wife got it more as a memento than intending to use it. New pans are just fine as well I'm sure. One thing I like about cast iron is that vintage pans are the same price as new, it's not like a collector's item. (Not a surprise, it's a hunk of iron so it's not like it needs a lot of care.) And yet, once we tried it, we never went back. A bunch of our other pans ended up gathering dust and eventually being donated away. Now we use it every day for almost everything: eggs, sauteing vegetables, even stews like shakshuka.

As for the crud, it's nothing we need to do anything about: it doesn't affect the cooking at all, but you know how it is, once you start scratching at something it's hard to stop until you're done. So there's 20 minutes gone this beautiful Sunday scraping crud. Still it's an oddly satisfying experience.

I can't tell you how much I like using the pan. It feels... good... to use a tool that's over a hundred years old and will outlive me. It's a common refrain but it feels like such a rarity to have an item like this today: things tend to be much more complicated and more disposable.