My Three Skillets
Greetings But First Breakfasters!! No recipes this week. Just a bit of musing about how cast iron skillets deserve a place in your kitchen
What do a Dutch Baby Pancake, roasted potatoes, and cornbread have in common? It’s not ingredients, or anything along those lines. It’s cooking those things in a cast iron skillet.
I have a 12-inch Lodge cast iron skillet which I’ve had for about five years. I bought that cast iron skillet because I had to.
The mismatched set of 3 cat iron skillets I inherited my grandmother years ago, have been packed away in a box and stored for almost a decade.
I’ve moved four times in that ten year period.
Yesterday, I finally managed to unpack them.
In case you’re wondering what cast iron skillets and moving have to do with breakfast, I’ll tell you.
Everything.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve eaten the three things I just mentioned, Dutch Baby Pancake, roasted potatoes, and cornbread for breakfast. Had I not used a cast iron skillet to cook those three disparate things, all of those dishes would have suffered.
But back to Grandma Cele.
My grandmother was a first generation American who grew up on Staten Island New York. I don’t know why she and my grandfather, a New Jerseyite, migrated south down to Baltimore, but migrate they did.
Grandma Cele, short for Celia, never learned to drive. She took streetcars everywhere before she took busses everywhere. She never left home without wearing a pair of gloves, a skirt, stockings, and a pocketbook–Baltimorean for handbag–that matched her shoes.
Grandma was what I call a utilitarian cook. It’s not a dig. Not at all. Being a utilitarian cook means she was a decent cook but not one who truly enjoyed cooking or spending hours in the kitchen. She worked full-time as a reading specialist in the Baltimore public school system during an era when most married women didn’t work outside the home.
That made her pretty special, but of course, when I was young, I didn’t realize how special it was to have a grandmother like that.
When I cook with cast iron, I’m always reminded of Grandma Cele. I don’t have strong memories about what she cooked so much as how her kitchen looked. Her copper canisters lined up along the kitchen counters, announced whether they held COFFEE, TEA, SUGAR, FLOUR. I remember how bright and sunny that kitchen was, how her apron hung from the hook next to the wall phone, the Stengl pottery dishes she used, the glass candy dish that was always filled with individually wrapped fruit candies. She cooked in her skirt, either a cup of tea or a cup of coffee at hand.
Growing up in Baltimore, smack dab on the Mason Dixon line means that technically, I grew up in the south. Maryland is considered the northernmost southern state. Its’ history as a slave holding state has always troubled me.
No one in my family lived in Maryland when enslavement was underway. My ancestors didn’t come to this country until the early 1900’s from eastern Europe and Russia, places where it was hard to be Jewish.
There’s a big difference between deciding to leave your homeland because you can’t live under its conditions and being taken against your will from your home, only to be sold off as property, your humanity taken from you as well.
The remnants of slavery stare you in the face in Baltimore. Lexington Market, established in 1782, was a thriving, viable market, full of purveyors of all kinds. But it was also a place where human slaves were bought and sold. Lexington Market stands today in its original location, though it is now a modern retail and gathering space.
The cooks in my family, my mother included, were New Yorkers. My mother’s mother, Grandma Fanny lived in New York her entire life and never made cornbread as far as I know. Neither my mother nor Grandma Cele made cornbread in a cast iron skillet like southern cooks did. When we ate cornbread, which wasn’t often, it was baked in a square pan like a batch of brownies.
In her book Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson writes about cornbread the way others might write about a beloved family member or a favorite holiday celebration. Her book is filled with stories passed down from her ancestors along with the recipes she cooks to remember them by. She devotes ten pages to cornbread alone. Here’s a snippet about cornbread and kitchen ghosts:
The kitchen ghosts have taught me well. There are a dozens of ways to enjoy cornbread, cornbread sticks, muffins. I make cornbread (slightly sweet) that pairs well with chili. Crumbly cornbread that’s best for dressing during the holidays. Jalapeño cornbread. Cornbread with whole kernels of corn or creamed corn. Crackling cornbread. Cornbread pone. Cornbread with onions. Think pineapple upside-down cake then replace the cake with cornbread and replace the pineapples with onions. And of course my favorite cornbread is cooked the old fashioned way like my grandmother made, and her mother made before her, in a skillet.
Like I said earlier, I don’t have many memories about how and what Grandma Cele cooked save for her meatballs in grape jelly sauce. I loved those meatballs. And I would guess she made those meatballs in the largest of the three skillets, the one from the Griswold Company out of Erie, Pennsylvania.
On a whim, I thought I’d try to bake a cornbread in Grandma’s eight inch skillet using Wilkinson’s Indian Creek Skillet recipe. The skillet looked to be in the best shape of the three and even though the recipe calls for a nine inch skillet I figured I could bake any leftover batter in a ramekin which is exactly what I did.
Now that I’ve finally unpacked Grandma’s skillets I plan to give them the TLC they deserve. They’ve been around for a while those three skillets. I think if they could talk they would tell me that it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember what Grandma cooked or that the only recipe I have from her is for those grapey meatballs.
They would tell me what Crystal Wilkinson knows about skillets which is that the best ones are seasoned with stories both old and new.
cornbread out of cast iron...nothing better!
Loved reading this Suzanne!