The cast iron skillet is, to me, the best symbol of the wisdom and quality of traditional food. Beyond just a great tool for many cooking tasks the cast iron skillet represents aspects of the whole lifestyle of a sustainable food culture. It functions beautifully over a flame, with even heat that is held efficiently to cook food. They are nothing if not sturdy and with the right care will last a lifetime. The process of keeping a happy cast iron is what really thrills me about them because they, like many natural materials like leather, stone, wood, or our own skin and body, need fat. After a good seasoning with fat and heat and the daily use of making breakfasts and dinners a cast iron skillet is pretty much “non-stick”. Today, that little phrase refers to modern pans made with polytetraflouroethylene, or teflon. The invention of teflon did not develop out of research into new cookware, but the sort of accidental product was marketed as such in the late 1940’s which fell in nicely to the eventual low-fat campaign.
The low-fat campaign should be lamented now for many reasons, but I think one significant effect of the modernizing of the American kitchen to be in line with what some scientists but mostly the large concentrated food industry told home cooks was best, was the move away from more natural materials. We got teflon pans, plastic cutting boards, tupperware…none of which needs fat for use or care, but neither does it do well with fat- plastics, like much of the American public, is rather fat-phobic.
The most common plastic container in our kitchen is the oft-reused Straus Yogurt quart sized containers (though I have to admit that we still use other plastic containers, though we give preference to glass and are trying to make the total switch). There is really nothing so silly feeling as trying to wash chicken fat or coconut curry sauce from the inside of these tubs. It never really gets clean. While the plastic cutting boards don’t need to be oiled and were purported to be more sanitary, they really don’t pass the test. Turns out the wooden cutting board is more resistant to harboring bacteria than is plastic and an old (lots of cuts) plastic cutting board does much worse than an old wooden one. Once a plastic cutting board is old and cut up it must be thrown away. The wooden one can be planed.
As for cookware, I rather think of teflon pans as the margarine of cooking tools. It replaced something old, perfect, and easily made with something new, born out of modern technology with military associations, marketed to be healthier. And we were fooled! Finally, with this new frictionless surface we didn’t need to add all that pesky grease just to get our food cooked. Well…that’s just the beauty of the cast iron skillet, it’s like it evolved with human cookery. It needs fat and so do we. To cook up vegetables and meats with no fat means, first of all less flavor as it’s the fat molecules that package up the flavor in the food to deliver taste to our tounge. But most importantly, fat is essential for the body in the building of cell membranes, production of hormones, slowing down the absorption of food in digestion to make us feel satiated and keeping blood sugar and moods stable. We also couldn’t use many of the nutrients in that non-stick skillet without fat, namely vitamins A, D, E, and K. To get vitamin A from carotene (the only way to get Vit A in a plant based diet) you need fat for that conversion. The list goes one, particularly when you look at functions and role of different fat types and sources.
I think the tide is turning back to a more balanced and traditional relationship with fat. Lots of little pieces of news and media have addressed the fallacies of the low-fat campaign. There was this great bit in the Huffington Post (originally from Civil Eats) and Gary Taubes was on fat-phobic Dr. Oz. There continue to be more studies to address the issue that it is very unlikely that an old practice (traditional high fat diets) would lead to new problems (increased rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes etc). There just seems something inherently wrong with that concept. So while we begin to embrace good fats in our food and on our tools, might we be ready to dispose of newfangled, less effective products that work in opposition to a traditional diet? This seems the most fitting thing to do with them since, unlike cast iron and wood, synthetic tools cannot be re-seasoned or re-surfaced and certainly don’t get better with age. In fact they get more dangerous and more toxic and need to be consistently replaced. Go to your local flea-market or thrift store and find some used cookware that likes the fat you need for a long life for you and your tools.
(For some further information on the care/seasoning of cast iron go here)
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