It was another long, strange year on Planet Earth, but amidst the madness of the human race, there was still fine food and drink, books and music, and so much more. We’ve rounded up a few of our favorites as a parting gift to all of you. Happy cooking, happy holidays, and happy New Year, y’all.
WHAT WE’VE READ
“We Lived Happily During the War” by poet Ilya Kaminsky. The New York Times profile of movie set designer Jack Fisk. The new World Within a Song by Jeff Tweedy. Clare de Boer’s Substack, The Best Bit. Festive Maryland Recipes from Kara Mae Harris and her blog, Old Line Plate. And the Times cooking section, always.
WHAT WE HEARD
The Pogues (R.I.P. Shane MacGowan). The Dirty Three (and their collabs with Nick Cave). “Hello Walls,” by Willie Nelson. Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. And in podcast land, the “Godfather of A.I. Has Some Regrets” episode of The Daily, the “Must Be Rats on the Brain” episode of This American Life, and the Nick Offerman interview of On Being.
WHAT WE WATCHED
The perfection that is Asteroid City. The sets and costumes of Killers of the Flower Moon. The whole binge of “Fargo” on Hulu. Margo Price at the 9:30 Club. Mark Rothko’s paintings on paper again at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. A sunset in the small town of San Lorenzo outside the city of Salta in Argentina.
WHERE WE ATE
Beneath the old trees of Lost Creek Farm in West Virginia—after a heck of a lot of hot dogs. Hank Shaw’s kitchen residency at the Pineridge Grouse Camp in Minnesota. In the side room at Little Donna’s in Baltimore (the pierogies forever and ever). Over the green-and-white tablecloths at J.G. Melon in Manhattan. Outside before the fire at Sumac in the Shenandoah Valley.
WHAT WE COOKED
As many soft-shell crabs as is just barely decent. Marcella Hazan’s spaghetti and meatballs. Sean Brock’s cornbread in the Heather. Anthony Bourdain’s French fries in the Homer. Pizzas in the Lili. The pear-almond tart from The River Café Cookbook, five sticks of butter and all, in the Joan. The Marion Burros plum torte. A lot of slow-roasted cabbage. Our CSA from Fox Briar Farm. And croutons, so many croutons.
WHAT WE DRANK
Our first homemade go at Philadelphia Fish House Punch. Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s “Terra Firma” riff on a vieux carré, over and over again. The “Gin and Juice 3.0” from Toni Tipton-Martin’s Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice. Current Cassis blackcurrant liqueur. Dram citrus seltzers. Too much coffee for our own good.
WHAT TOOLS WE USED
An E. Dehillerin carbon steel chef’s knife. A ThermoWorks Therapen. An Anova sous vide machine. Nesco’s vacuum sealer. Snow Peak’s collapsible coffee drip. The Cooks Illustrated kitchen hacks page. Cowboy Cauldrons, Mill Scales and YETIs, of course.
WHAT STAYED IN OUR KITCHENS
Duke’s Mayonnaise. Snake Oil hot sauce. Rancho Gordo beans. Keepwell’s celery vinegar. Trader Joe’s shelf-stable cream. J.Q. Dickinson salt. Furikake seasoning. J.O. Spice.
WHAT WE CELEBRATED
Our 10th year in business and the release of a bunch of new products—oven mitts, pocket holders, conditioner. And oh yeah, that YETI pan, too. We traveled. We visited family. We lost dogs—and got new ones. We planted gardens. We built fires. We thanked the stars for clear skies, once the smoke cleared. And for health and safety in this heavy world. We’ve got big things brewing for next year, and we can’t wait for Best Made and “True Detective” and Saveur (in print!) to return.
Dear readers, as many of you now well know, we are more often than not writing to you from our home on the Chesapeake Bay, situated on the tidewater edge of Maryland, also known as the Old Line State.
We’re a small-but-mighty terrain divided by our nation’s largest estuary, with its sprawling watershed cultivating a multitude of distinct communities—and in turn traditions—from river to river, sometimes stream to stream, even creek to creek.
To the east, in our neck of the woods, is the Eastern Shore, a low-lying landscape rooted in its farm fields and brackish tributaries, from which so much of our state’s iconic sweet corn, summer tomatoes, blue crabs, and oysters often hails. And to the west, we have our big cities—Annapolis, Baltimore, and onwards into Washington, D.C.
A map of St. Mary’s County.
But more importantly still (for our purposes here today), to the south, there is a wide, craggy peninsula that leads down the Western Shore—miles and miles and miles, past suburbs, onto country two-lanes, through thickets of pine forest, never far from sandy cliffs, into another sense of place and time that bottoms out at the mighty Potomac, just north of the Virginia line.
And it is here, and only here, in the deep heart of Southern Maryland—some 70 miles south of the state capital—and in St. Mary’s County, more specifically, that you can find the delightful hyper-regional delicacy that we’ve come here to tell you about today: stuffed ham.
“Stuffed ham?!” we expect you to ask incredulously. We once had the same reaction, too.
We can’t recall when we first learned about this peculiar pork dish. Maybe it was that Church Lady in our old stomping grounds of Alexandria, Virginia, who grew up down that way and brought us back our first taste in the 1990s. Or maybe it was Mrs. Edward Edelen’s recipe appearing the iconic local cookbook, Maryland’s Way. But whenever it was that we discovered it, the obsession—not unlike the West Virginia hot dog—was instantaneous. We had to know, and eat, more.
After all, “Occasionally one hears of a newcomer—a visitor, even—whose sensitive palate quivers with delight at the first piquant bite,” wrote The New York Times in 1982, with what has been heralded as one of America’s most hyper-regional dishes never expanding beyond its native range.
Hearty greens to stuff the ham.
In the close-knit communities of St. Mary’s County, stuffed ham is a source of great pride. Each family has their own recipe, often perfected over multiple generations. There are subtle differences between each, and all could start a decent argument. Kale or cabbage. Red or black pepper. Mustard or celery seed. Both. Neither. All of the above. Whatever the preference, it is the definition of a labor of love—and not for the impatient.
For starters, you always begin with a whole fresh ham—though great debate still ensues over whether to debone or not to debone. It is corned, aka cured in salt or brine, then generously sliced with deep slits, before being stuffed and smothered with several pounds of a well-macerated mixture of hearty greens. Turnip tops and watercress are thrown in occasionally, plus a hefty dose of alliums, seasonings, and spices to the maker’s liking.
From there, the ham gets unceremoniously swaddled in whatever fabric you can sacrifice to the swine gods—cheesecloth, pillowcases, even an old T-shirt—before being dropped into a big pot and boiled for several hours. Once it reaches a desired temperature, it is cooled quickly, wherever it might fit: in a fridge, in an extra-large cooler, on a below-freezing back porch.
Boiling a ham.
The whole process takes a couple days, but when it’s all said and done, the stuffed ham is sliced cold and served on a sandwich or by its lonesome. Condiments are a point of contention.
“It’s quite an undertaking,” says Kara Mae Harris, a Baltimore historian behind the regionally beloved food blog, Old Line Plate, who has spent the last decade following the unofficial Stuffed Ham Trail of Southern Maryland in search of this elusive deliciousness.
No one knows the stuffed ham’s exact origins, which likely date as far back as the 1600s.
By now, though, most agree that the dish has roots in Afro-Caribbean culture, likely cultivated by the local enslaved population of this deeply entrenched tobacco-growing region and passed on by word-of-mouth. Multiple iterations appear in 300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County, an esteemed community cookbook, in which African-American descendants recall their ancestors’ ingenuity in combining pork scraps with garden-grown greens to create a comfort food that could last the ages. Eventually, stuffed ham made its way to the head table, and it has remained a ritual shared between both Black and white households ever since.
Drying tobacco in St. Mary’s County.
These days, the real deal is still made for special occasions, be it a county-fair cook-off, seasonal church fundraiser, or a family’s holiday feast—especially on Easter, when “the air in St. Mary’s County is permeated by the odor of stuffed ham a-cooking,” wrote The Baltimore Sun in 1950. Though it appears at Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and just because, too.
And if you’re lucky, you can still find it like Harris has—at country stores, small supermarkets, or the sporadic gas station, sold as a sandwich or even whipped in egg rolls or thrown on top of pizza—with its charcuterie-like salty-sweet, slightly spicy, punchy piquant flavor making it a one-of-a-kind accoutrement. Those places are becoming harder and harder to come by, being lost to changing communities and traditions and tastes, like so many of our most authentic foodways.
A stuffed ham, illustrated by Ben Claassen, courtesy of Old Line Plate.
“I’ve struggled to describe why it’s so good, and the answer is, I don’t know,” says Harris, who adds chile de árbol to her personal version. “It’s that devotion, and the difficulty, and the specificity that makes it so special. And when done right, it comes out so succulent, with those savory greens, then you put it on some bread with a little mayonnaise, and it's like no ham salad you’ve ever eaten.”
Simple alchemy, perhaps?
“Exactly,” says Harris. “It is really so much more than the sum of its parts.”
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There’s a fair question that we could all ask ourselves these days: “What’s the beef?” We mean that literally, of course, with America in the midst of a red-meat renaissance, and its prized protein appearing on butcher-shop counters and in grocery-store cold cases with more options than ever before.
In some ways, this is incredible. On one hand, after generations of ignorance-is-bliss convenience, we’re becoming acquainted with (and interested in) our food again, and the market is rising to meet the demand. The farm-to-table movement gave rise to whole-animal butchery, which introduced us to unlikely cuts, while a new wave of farmers has shifted toward producing high-quality meat hinged on practices like ethical care, environmental conservation, and sustainability. It’s why we can find oyster and baseball and buvette steaks next to our old-standby ribeyes.
On the other hand, though, as steaks and sausages flood the meat counter with a slew of terminology—A5, prime, choice, select, grass-fed, grain-finished, certified, and so on—it leaves many a consumer in a state of confusion, unaware of what exactly it is they’re eating. It leaves us wanting to know what are we buying, what is the best of the best, and what is simply marketing, or even misinformation? And nowhere in the beef department is this such an issue as with the most hallowed of all, Wagyu.
It’s a wild story, well reported by Texas Monthly, but in 1976, the first four bulls were exported from Japan to the United States in a shroud of controversy, and upon arrival, were swiftly crossbred with other cow breeds, ultimately diluting the delicacy. For this, it was a slow crawl to the top, but in 1992, their progeny won big at the National Western Stock Show, and the next year, eased restrictions between the two countries brought the first load of Wagyu cattle stateside in 17 years. Before long, a boom of breeding was underway, causing Japan to swiftly ban the export of its sacred crow in 1997, now officially deemed a national treasure.
At that point, though, the calf was already out of the pen, so to speak. It is now estimated that there are now some 40,000 Wagyu cattle in the United States, be they full-blood (aka 100 percent Wagyu), purebred (aka at least 93.75 percent Wagyu), or cross-bred (50% or less). It is said that the vast majority happen to be the latter. And they’re not all created equal.
To understand the difference, let’s begin with the USDA’s beef grading system, which is already enigmatic to many consumers. Here in the U.S., beef receives one of three grades primarily based on its marbling—aka the amount of intramuscular fat (IMF), aka those streaks within the cut of the meat—which impacts flavor and tenderness.
“It’s the last type of fat to be put on by the animal, so they have to be healthy and well-proportioned everywhere else before it even starts forming,” says Texas chef Jess Pryles, who earned her graduate degree in meat science from Iowa State University. “The more marbling, the higher the grade.”
In three main categories, “prime” is the highest quality—ranging from an IMF of 9.9 to 12.3 percent or higher—but only makes up 2 percent of all of our American beef. Followed by “choice” (IMF 4.0 to 9.8), followed by “select” (IMF 2.3 to 3.9), with lowers grades sold ungraded or as store-brand meat. Grading is optional, but producers or processing facilities can request visits from a USDA inspector, who will visually grade each carcass off a cut between the 12th and 13th rib, aka the ribeye, which separates the fore and hind quarter.
“While choice can be comparable to some prime, there is a noticeable difference between prime and select, and even select and choice,” says Pryles. “This shows up in terms your flavor, your texture, your juiciness. The higher you move up, the more those desirable traits increase. . . . The USDA grades are the best way for the consumer to be guaranteed a minimum quality.”
But to make matters even more confusing, the crème de la crème of beef—Wagyu—is largely known in terms of the Japanese grading system. Unlike like the USDA’s simple terminology, theirs appears in the form letters—based on the yield, aka the amount of retail cuts able to be made from a single carcass—and numbers—based on the marbling, aka IMF, which can reach significantly higher than prime, often exceeding 30 percent—ultimately ranging from C1 to the lauded A5. These vary from Wagyu to Wagyu, with crossbred still better than much of what you can find in the grocery store, but higher scores are typically correlated with full-blood breeds. And no, the cows are not massaged or fed fine beer, as has long been the myth, but there are myriad other traditions involved; like French wine, some varieties only hail from famed regions, like Kobe, aka the capitol of Hyogo.
Meanwhile, in America, it’s the wild west. Here, Wagyu is loosely defined and largely an umbrella term. In order to be labeled as such, the USDA only requires that the animal have at least one purebred or full-blood parent, which might make the beef you’re eating less than half Wagyu, with no further official grades to relay the spectrum of quality. Meaning that unless your Wagyu steak hails from Japan (or Australia, where strict standards are also enforced), that American designation is largely a matter of blind faith.
Which is why a Wagyu ribeye can be found on the shelf at Walmart for less than $20 a pound. Which is why Arby’s now sells a six-buck Wagyu burger, which could be as little as 22 percent Wagyu, and even then, just the scraps mixed with other unknown beef. At the same time, walk into a restaurant and you might pay premium Japanese prices for a steak that’s majority Angus or Holstein or Hereford. At the end of the day, you don’t necessarily know what you’re paying for.
“Wagyu doesn’t mean anything without further context,” says Pryles, noting that brands have flooded the market with their own ratings, plus other arbitrary marketing lingo to label their products the likes of “gold” or “platinum.” “You need to know the IMF, but even then, if a company tells you their Wagyu is A5, who’s verifying it?”
To combat this issue, set a standard of quality, and keep their product from becoming a commodity like other cattle, the American Wagyu Association is in the process of creating their own certified grading program, akin to those used by the USDA and in Australia and Japan.
A Waygu bull at Caroland Farms.
“That program is supposed to give the consumer the ability to know what they’re buying,” says Matt Rainey, board member of the American Wagyu Association and farm manager at Caroland Farms in Landrum, South Carolina, whose herd is made up of 400 full-blood Wagyu cattle. “We want customers to be able to go from restaurant to restaurant, farm to farm, see a grade, and know the difference, so they can decide what they’re willing to pay for. Some people may not care, but there are a lot of people who appreciate the quality.”
And in the meantime, some small full-blood farms like Caroland have started to enlist technology commonly used abroad in the form of a state-of-the-art carcass cameras, which can calculate more than 10 data points about the meat, from marbling to meat density. Compared to the human eye, these tools are prized for their accuracy, consistency, and objectivity. And for farmers like Rainey, they help not only confirm IMF, but also to inform the future of the herd, with the information received influencing their breeding selection as they strive toward producing higher and higher quality meat.
(Similarly, in the manufacturing industry, such as with cast-iron cookware, profilometers are common tools used to measure the industry standard of surface roughness average, or Ra. To the unknowing cook, our pans might seem just as smooth as some of the competition. But this piece of technology helps us prove that Butter Pats do indeed have a lower Ra than the rest, and as we’ve told you before, much like marbling to a piece of meat, smoothness matters. Higher Ra is more likely to lead to cracks or corrosion and, especially for our purposes, poor seasoning.)
“Until official grading comes along, this is our checks and balances,” says Rainey. “It lets us make sure that the quality we’re putting out there is what we’re striving for.”
A Wagyu steak from Caroland Farms.
And there’s good reason to care so much. In the commodity beef industry, bigger is better and cattle are grown to size as quickly and cost-effectively as possible—read fast and cheap. Whereas, like other small, mindful cattle operations across the U.S., Wagyu are a long-term investment, sometimes taking twice as long to reach market, and in turn, their ample marbling. But with the right level of attention and care, it’s a difference you can clearly taste.
“It’s a pretty cool animal,” says Rainey, noting that peer-reviewed studies have even linked high-IMF Wagyu with lower cholesterol. “It makes it difficult to go to restaurants. Let’s just say I don’t eat many steaks out anymore.”
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This is not a story about cast iron, even if it hails from a place in which cast iron is so closely connected and carried on so culturally to this day. It is, in fact, a shaggy dog about hot dogs. West Virginia hot dogs, to be exact—a regional delicacy of the Appalachian foodway that reveals an unexpectedly rich and riveting history about the old Mountain State. Follow along on our insatiable (and bellyaching) quest to better understand these chili-and-slaw-slathered buns.
]]>The first time we heard about a West Virginia hot dog, we were paging through Ronni Lundy’s 2016 Victuals—a lovely ode to Appalachia, told through the tales and recipes of its foodway, written by one of the region’s most premier storytellers—when we were struck by an image of three chili- and slaw-covered buns.
By this point, we had already become captivated by the West Virginia pepperoni roll, with trips to the eastern edge of the Mountain State leading us to gas stations, country stores, and supermarket bakeries in search of the unexpectedly local snack. “What was it doing here?,” we wondered, in a land so deeply associated (especially to outsiders like us) with cast-iron cornbread and heirloom beans.
But it was a question that would quickly shift its focus when we read Lundy’s line about another culinary delicacy found throughout this region, often at its drive-in restaurants, ice cream stands, and lunch counters: “The aficionados know that what you really come for,” she wrote, “begins with chili on a hot dog bun.”
And what we discovered next was not just our hands on our very first West Virginia hot dog, but a rich and riveting history about the Almost Heaven from which it came.
That alluring hot dog photo from Victuals by Ronni Lundy, originally taken by Johnny Autry.
Dear reader, we will forewarn you: this is not a story about cast iron, even if it is set in a place in which the cookware is so closely connected and carried on so culturally to this day. It is, in fact, a shaggy dog about hot dogs. About West Virginia hot dogs, to be exact. But what, after all, for the uninitiated, is a West Virginia hot dog anyways?
Breaking the fourth wall again, let us be clear: we are not the folks to tell you. We are admittedly but lowly neophytes when it comes to the love and lore of this hyper-regional delight. Actually, in our neck of the woods, some 300 miles away on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, we would refer to ourselves as “chicken neckers,” part of our own colloquial canon, best defined in William Warner’s 1977 iconic Beautiful Swimmers as a synonym for “outsiders and rank amateurs, since there is a widespread belief among dilettante crabbers that chicken necks are the best crab bait,” compared to the local waterman’s prized eel.
Exhibit A of our amateur hour: the first time we had a “West Virginia hot dog,” we sacrilegiously attempted to make our own. We stumbled upon a country market in Grant County where the deli counter sold house-made chili sauce and creamy coleslaw. We threw a pack of hot dogs and a bag of buns into our basket, and that afternoon, we turned on a gas camp grill, roasted the wienies in a skillet, heated the sauce in a pot, slathered it and the slaw on either side of a toasted bun, topped it with a sprinkle of diced onion, and, at the very end, a zigzag of bright-yellow ballpark mustard.
Admittedly, it was damn good. But we would soon learn the wrongs of our ways upon venturing deeper into West Virginia, into the thick of Hot Dog Country.
Homemade hot dogs near Dolly Sods.
So we’ll hand it over to the experts from here, who insist that this is not a chili dog. Nor is it a Coney Island dog, like those sold in New York or Detroit (though it might be a close relative—more on that later). Nor it is a slaw dog of the deeper South, either.
“A true West Virginia hot dog is a heavenly creation that begins with a wiener on a soft steamed bun—add mustard, a chili-like sauce and top it off with coleslaw and chopped onions and you have a symphony of taste that quite possibly is the reason that many transplanted West Virginians can never really be happy living anywhere else,” writes the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog, founded in 2006 by Charleston native Stanton Means, who has become the de facto authority on all things of his website’s namesake. “Different parts of West Virginia have variations on the theme, but the common elements are sweet, creamy coleslaw and chili. Anything else is just not a true West Virginia hot dog!”
Our education began in earnest this summer, when we found ourselves seated at Ritzy Lunch in Clarksburg, located in the northcentral heart of the state, about an hour in either direction from the Maryland, Pennsylvania, or Ohio lines. We were meeting our friends Mike Costello and Amy Dawson from nearby Lost Creek Farm, who suggested that if we were seeking a real-deal West Virginia hot dog, we should look no further than this circa-1933 diner on West Pike Street, just a few doors over from the old downtown theater.
Ritzy Lunch on Pike Street in Clarksburg.
Here, hot dogs are the first thing on the menu, and they are served with a whizz of mustard that is hidden beneath a stratum of finely ground, mildly spicy chili, then a scattering of diced yellow onion, before being capped off with a well-chopped, bright-purple slather of slightly sweet slaw.
“We’re on the Slaw Line,” says Costello, referring to the Mason-Dixon of the hot dog’s main regional variation—to slaw or not to slaw. Harrison County, where we now sit, is the uppermost reach of this invisible boundary, and anywhere north of it, you won’t find a speck of cabbage for miles and miles, a veritable No Slaw Zone. So much so that the late proprietor of Yann’s Hot Dog Stand in Fairmont was famously known for kicking customers who asked about it out of his shop, with the Seinfeldian reputation noted in his obituary. And even here, in Clarksburg, some places don’t just serve the shredded dressing when you order a dog “with everything,” as is implied in towns farther south. You might have to explicitly ask for it. And trust us: you should.
Still, there are other riffs on standard toppings, such as whether the slaw is a house-made recipe or store-bought iteration. In some parts of the state, particularly further west, the chili might be referred to as simply “sauce,” which is fitting, given its thinner, lighter, bean-less consistency, especially when compared to the meatier stuff of Super Bowl crockpots. Some are spicy. Some are smokey. Some have more or less cumin or pepper or tomato.
End of service at Flying Dogs in Jane Lew.
And when it comes to the wiener—typically a standard six-inch versus a jumbo or foot-long, making it easy to eat at least two in one sitting, though you’ll probably want a third—they’re flexible. Pork or beef. Boiled, griddled, or grilled. Because it’s less about the protein and largely about the delicate dance between the ingredients. Between factory-made and from-scratch. Between resourcefulness and creativity.
But buns should be steamed—“soft, not toasted,” writes Lundy. And absolutely no ketchup.
“That’s the fun of it,” says Costello, “but they all serve the same utilitarian purpose, as they always have.”
Here’s what he means:
Though no one knows who made the original West Virginia hot dog, the food’s origins have as nuanced a past as America itself, intertwined with the immigration, industrialization, and urbanization of the turn of the 20th century—an edible witness.
According to former state folklorist Emily Hilliard, the first known reference appeared in an 1897 Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, which referenced a “wiener-wurst vendor” at the local fair. By the 1910s, Greek immigrants—some arriving by way of New York City—were the driving force behind the growing number of hot dog stands and carts setting up shop across the state, largely located in industrial hubs, from the southern and northern coalfield cities to the factory towns along the Ohio River. But there were Italian entrepreneurs, too, like the founders of Ritzy’s, who hail from Calabria, Italy.
King Tut Drive-Inn in Beckley, courtesy of WVU’s West Virginia and Regional History Center.
No one knows exactly, but at this time, on the eve of the Great Depression, they were reportedly consumed by the thousands—each day—providing a fast, filling, affordable meal for laborers between or during shifts, much like the handheld pepperoni roll, which arrived in northcentral counties with Italian miners. A 1920 Charleston Daily Mail claimed that if all the hot dogs consumed that year had been strung together, they would extend more than 100 miles, to Huntington and back, and maybe then some.
Slaw did not become an accoutrement until later, when Sissonville’s Stopette Drive-In advertised their brand-new “hot dog with slaw” in 1922, possibly thanks to the influence of the region’s German and Eastern European communities. And the frankfurters themselves might have even been a byproduct of the meatpacking boom in burgeoning metropolises around the Rust Belt.
But despite their popularity, hot dogs were also a vessel for racist and classist resentments in rapidly developing and demographically diversifying region, notably in towns like Fairmont. Also in 1922, the town’s largely immigrant coal miners went on strike over unfair working conditions, and a flurry of newspaper articles, in which city officials attacked immigrant-run hot dog stands as suddenly “dangerous” and “unsightly,” seemed to send a clear message to the proprietors and blue-collar clientele. In fact, establishments like the Greek-run Sanitary Hot Dog in Clarksburg named their businesses as such to combat the hostility.
“The hot dog is not only a beloved West Virginia tradition, but also a cultural mirror,” wrote Hilliard in her recent book, Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia, “revealing issues of race, gender, class, labor, the built environment, and how the triviality barrier impacts the historical record and cultural preservation.”
Sanitary Meats butcher shop in Charleston, courtesy of WVU’s West Virginia and Regional History Center.
Indeed, the hot dogs are small, but mighty, and despite attempts to drag their deliciousness, they only evolved into a phenomenon, becoming commonplace—and quintessential—throughout the state. And these days, even as old shops now close, like the beloved Skeenies in Charleston, other stalwarts remain, like King Tut in Beckley or Stewart’s in Huntington, and new ones continue to open. For now, these joints remain relatively ubiquitous, particularly in the central and western regions, with an estimated 350 and counting. Prices have increased from a mere ten cents in the 1950s, but they’re still a steal, ranging between one and three bucks today.
During our last visit, our Lost Creek friends sent us on a local crawl to indulge in as many dogs as our waistbands could manage. At Flying Dogs in Jane Lew, an ironic poster of costumed Daschunds hung on the wall as we ordered a pair to go, which, with a well-seasoned sauce and slather of white slaw, were then consumed quickly on our tailgate, as West Virginia hot dogs are best eaten immediately. And on a nearby backroad, Poling’s Dairy King was the only dining establishment for miles, appearing out of nowhere with an old hand-painted sign that hawked “fast food,” and any sort of cabbage-y condiment was not on offer this afternoon. And further up the road still, at Toni’s, local teenagers forwent the peppery chili entirely, instead opting for ice cream before hopping into a car together and speeding off into the hot summer evening.
Poling’s Dairy King in Harrison County.
In her book—a requisite resource for anyone interested in this corner of Appalachia—Hilliard delves into the changing face of West Virginia. Clarksburg’s population is now half the size that it was in the middle of the last century, and many storefronts of its grand buildings have long since shuttered downtown, with the local churches and the Italian bakeries, with their fresh-out-of-the-oven pepperoni rolls, being the biggest draw on Sundays.
Some of her most compelling context references the ways in which exploitation of the state’s natural resources have altered the local landscape and its communities. And she connects these changes to the importance of mom-and-pop businesses, like these old-school eateries, which can serve as a tether to another time, to an enduring identity.
We’ll think about that every time we eat one. Which will hopefully be again soon.
In other words, these spaces have stories to tell, ones still inextricably interwoven into the fabric of this dynamic place.
“While a hot dog can’t restore what West Virginia has lost,” says Hilliard, “it can offer sustenance—nutritional and communal.”
We’ll think about that every time we eat one. Which hopefully will happen again soon.
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When we finally felt ready to buy a smoker, we knew there was only one place to call. Mill Scale Metalworks is located in Lockhart, Texas—halfway between Austin and San Antonio—where brothers Matt and Caleb Johnson make the finest custom smokers, we would argue, in all of the United States.
The Johnsons grew up outside of Waco, and from an early age, were learning about welding, woodworking, and fixing up cars from their father. Moving to the state capital in 2007, they started careers in architectural steel design, and as the barbecue scene started to take off, they found themselves building smokers for the famed Franklin’s Barbecue before striking off on their own in 2018, winding up in Lockhart, known as the barbecue capital of Texas.
“We grew up seeing a big smoker in everybody’s backyard—it’s part of the DNA here in Texas, you’re always smelling post oak in the air, it’s like the free outdoor air freshener,” says Matt, pictured above on right. “But what I thought was brisket as a kid is a totally different business than what we’re in now.”
Barbecue has a long history in their neck of the woods. It began with direct-heat cooking, with meat roasted over a frame of wood above the high temperatures of an open flame, according to Texas Monthly. Later, the practice moved to dug-out, in-ground pits, constructed and tended to by Black cooks, and by the late 19th century, they were built up, above ground.
As markets and eventually restaurants started selling barbecue, they moved inside an oven, which was moved inside of a building—at the same time that the American kitchen was transforming from one of open hearths to those of enclosed cast-iron stoves, in the name of progress and sanitation.
But it wouldn’t be until the 1920s that indirect-heat cooking—the low, slow process that makes even the toughest cuts of meat fall off the bone—would become the holy grail of American barbecue that is has become today. There’s a good chance it began at the Kreuz Market in Mill Scale’s own Lockhart, and by the 1950s, the backyard barbecue craze brought with it the first commercially available “smokers,” sold as half-drum-like gadgets for Saturday picnics. Though it would still take another two decades for the now ubiquitous offset-style smokers to arrive, first in the form of custom smokers built from old oil pipes in the 1970s, and more recently, using decommissioned propane tanks, like the flagship smokers built by Mill Scale—now essentially a symbol of the Lone Star State.
In modern day, these manual steel smokers are a Luddite’s dream. There are no gadgets, gizmos, buttons, and definitely no digital computer screens. Instead, they generally consist of a simple cylindrical cooking chamber to hold the meat, a separate firebox for that burning wood on one end, and a chimney-like smokestack on the other, altogether drawing air, heat, and clean smoke in an open loop slowly and consistently around the meat.
At Mill Scale, these bad boys range in size from 94 to 1000 gallons, with the latter running 20 feet long, weighing 5,000 pounds, and hauled by their own trailers. Their design tips a hat to their upbringing around classic vehicles, from their natural patinas to white-walled tires, with functional features honed through conversations with chefs and pitmasters.
And with the fire-cooking craze booming, they also make Japanese-style yakitori grills, asado-style fire pits, outdoor kitchens fit with planchas, cast-iron grates, and more, with this global approach inspired in part by their own upbringing, with their mother hailing from Portugal. Their 10-person team cranks out both residential and commercial cookers for customers across the country and now around the world.
The Johnson brothers are part of the ongoing evolution of Texas barbecue, and their goal is to make the technique approachable, far and wide.
“What we really want to make it a tool that brings people together,” says Matt, who shares his go-to tips below, including how to incorporate your cast-iron cookware. Spoiler alert: it’s a must-have smoker accessory.
Use indirect heat for big pieces of meat.
“An offset smoker is essentially an oven with convection and the heating element is smoke. That indirect heat allows you to take big cuts of meat that would traditionally be difficult to cook, tough in texture, with a lot of fat, and slowly break it all down into tender bites while still getting that ‘bark’ formation like a beautiful crust. It also allows the smoke density to infiltrate the meat and add a ton of flavor. Imagine cooking brisket on the direct heat of a grill; you would eventually burn the outside, but it would be raw and fatty in the middle.”
Start small.
“Start with kindling, wood chunks, small splits of wood, like nine inches in length and about an inch and a half in diameter. We personally like to stack the into little log cabins tyle with a little bit of charcoal in the middle to start the coal bed. To ignite it, you can use a propane torch or a tumbleweed fire starter or the butcher’s paper that your meat came in.”
Build a “clean” fire.
“You want what’s evacuating out of the exhaust stack to be thin blue or transparent smoke—not a gray, cloudy, train-style smoke. That has a lot to do with your woods selection and it has a lot to do with airflow. The first question we ask is: what is the wood—is it wet, is it green, is it hardwood, how big is it? Tuffy Stone said it best; use what’s local. In Texas, we use post oak, California has red oak, the Northeast has hickory, Mexico has mesquite. The key is using a hardwood that’s seasoned and dry. Otherwise, it’s going to be pushing out a lot of moisture and producing dirty smoke, which translates into a rancid flavor profile. The size of the wood is important; you have more control and even temperature if you’re using small pieces, but it also means you have to manage the fire more, replacing the wood more often. If you’re putting in big logs, it’s going to take a longer time to ignite and burn down, and then there will be temperature swings. When cooking meats like brisket, consistent heat is critical. And then the second is about airflow, which you need to have a clean burning fire. Fire needs oxygen to breathe. This comes in through the firebox, and you can crack the door to add more. But too much airflow can be a bad thing, too.”
On that note, mind the weather.
“Rain, humidity, wind, temperature. It can all have an impact. If wind is blowing into your firebox, you’re going to have accelerated airflow, accelerated draw, faster burning wood, it's going to increase your temperature. If there’s no wind at all, you might have to crack your door or open your vent a little bit more to add some oxygen and fuel your fire. If it’s cold out in the northeast, your wood is going to take longer to ignite, and if it has some ice on it, it’s going to take more time to start burning clean smoke. Here in Texas, that wood can be 90 degrees when it goes from your pile to your firebox, and it ignites instantly. That’s why a lot of times you see people staging logs on a firebox—they’re pre-warming those logs to ignite quicker.”
Take your time.
“Embrace the process. Using time and understand the power that is has, to your advantage or disadvantage, is the most important aspect of cooking with fire. If you’re cooking big cuts of meat that take 12 or 14 hours, give it the time it takes—it’s ready when it’s ready. You can always increase your heat and speed things up, but you just need to be aware that there’s a lot of nuance, and you could end up burning it. It is a slow process.”
But don’t save it just for Saturdays.
“It doesn’t have to be a special occasion or the Super Bowl to bust it out. I’ve been known to cook with fire on a Tuesday night. Choose thinner cuts of meat or vegetables for quicker cook times. You can make chicken wings in a smoker in about an hour, or I’ll do meal prep, where I’ll cook several whole chickens or a couple pork butts and then integrate those into dishes throughout the week. It doesn’t always have to take an entire day.”
Smoke your cast iron, too.
“We use them for everything, from making cowboy cornbread to holding the fat trimmings of a brisket to rendering down tallow. I’ve even seen people do beef cheeks and carnitas in cast irons in the smoker. There’s a ton of stuff that you can do with it.”
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What’s in a number? It’s a question commonly asked when it comes to cast iron. Look on the bottom or handle of many an antique pan and you’re likely to find 6s, 8s, 10s, and so on, as for decades, numbers were signature features on these skillets. So much so that new pan companies have started to numerically mark their own, paying tribute to the old practice. Which is one, it turns out, as useless today as our tiny cast-iron Alma. (Though no offence to either.)
The answer to our original question is shrouded in its fair share of myth and controversy, but we do know that its origins date back just over two centuries, when the Age of Enlightenment would bring about many a pivotal innovation and invention, especially in relation to our kitchens.
For our purposes, perhaps the most important development arrived on the eve of the 1800s, with the process of standardization. We used measurements back in those days, but throughout the 1700s, we still had yet to figure out to make life easier by developing some set of standards, aka models with which to compare things. Even as we created the influential likes of the lightning rod, the piano, the smallpox vaccination, we never made two nails—let alone two skillets—that were exactly the same.
Enter standardization, which arose out of the Industrial Revolution, when standards were invented and implemented to both improve and increase production. Many say it all started with Eli Whitney, the New England inventor of the cotton gin, who in 1797 proposed the making of flint-powered firearms with interchangeable parts. Up until that moment, each gun was made one by one, piece by piece, bit by bit, by the hands of a single gunsmith. But credit is also due across the pond to two Englishmen, Marc Brunel and Henry Maudslay, who at the same time were crafting identical pulleys and precision tools for shipbuilding, as well as an early production line.
With the invention of identical, interchangeable parts, manufacturers were now able to start making larger runs of the same item for the very first time. Standardization enhanced product uniformity and drove down price for the customer. And as manufacturing advanced, so, in many cases, did the standard of living.
Exhibit A is the early cookstove, invented in the first half of the 1800s. A dramatic upgrade from open hearths in terms of cleanliness and safety, these enclosed stoves, eventually made out of cast iron, began to be produced en masse and quickly became a fixture for middle-class homes. Before long, iron foundries realized they had found a gold mine, and began making cast-iron cookware as an easy add-on.
Contrary to popular belief, these numbers did not usually equate to exact or even actual measurements, such as the diameter of the eye or pan, as proven by the Favorite 1, or better yet, the Griswold 0. On top of that, a Lodge 10 was not the same as the 10 of a Wagner, or any of the other guys, with standardization existing within brand but missing the industry-wide memo.
Today, just to make matters even more confusing, we’ve decided to use letters. Where our handle’s base meets our pan’s rounded edge, you’ll find a small loopy squiggle—in fact, an initial—with each pan named in honor of someone who has influenced us in some seminal way. They are mothers, wives, grandmothers, great aunts, and increasingly, fathers, uncles, cousins, sons. And a few pals of Butter Pat thrown in for good measure.
We figured that, since the numbers are antiquated with our modern stoves anyways, we might as well use a design element that means something, if only just to us. And that tells a story, if only one just slightly less complicated.
They are in indeed an homage to the past—to the tradition of numbering cast irons, to all of the practice’s legend and lore. But at the core, these letters, literally hand-drawn by our founder and located at the grip of our own fingertips, are meant to remind us.
About the people who make these pans. About the former foundrymen who also inscribed early cast irons, using a simple stylus to carve those numbers right into the pattern’s clay. About Estee and Heather, Joan and Lili. Our friends Eric and Joe. Even little old Aunt Alma.
That they were here, and we were, too, before the measurements or mass production or machines took over. And hopefully will be long after.
We didn’t realize in the beginning, but with these names, the pans themselves have become personified. It’s an unintended consequence but welcome embodiment—through the meals they make and the community they create in the kitchen or around the table—of what makes us human.
Which, of course, is anything but standard.
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Maybe you know it as “eggs in toast.” Or “toad in a hole.” Or even “uova fritte nel pane.” But whatever your family called it, you have, at least once in your lifetime, undoubtedly eaten this egg dish of many names and one simple recipe: butter in a pan, a slice of white bread, its center cut out, an egg cracked and fried inside. But after all these years, what should we call it? Come with us on this weird, wonderful, wholly unnecessary exploration of etymology—and one of our most beloved breakfasts.
]]>Maybe you knew it as “eggs in toast.” Maybe “eggs in a hole.” Maybe “eggs in a frame.” Or, perhaps, the more common refrain but still curious “toad in a hole”—or “frog in a pond.”
But whatever your family called it, at some point in your life, you have undoubtedly eaten this egg dish of many names and one simple recipe: butter in a pan, a slice of white bread, its center cut out, an egg cracked and fried inside.
But after all the generations that it’s been passed down, after all the kitchens in which it’s been cooked, and all the tables and countertops and paper napkins and laps on which it’s been eaten, the question remains: which name came first?
As is the case with most colloquialisms, spread by word-of-mouth, altered by hearsay and history, it looks like we might never know it’s true etymology. But a few things we do, predominantly from pop culture:
The lesser-known “gashouse eggs” was likely derived from the German word gasthaus, for an inn or country home. It was mentioned in the 1941 Betty Gable film, Moon Over Miami, but a few years earlier, the even-lesser-known “Guy Kibbee Egg” nickname was used, supposedly in relation to the early actor of the same name, who ate said eggs in the 1935 Mary Jane’s Pa, before going on to star in the actually-known Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Of course, if we had our druthers, the Oscar would go to a cameo in the 1987 cinematic cult classic, Moonstruck, starring Cher and Olympia Dukakis, who fries up a delectable-looking version with roasted red peppers and olive oil before chaos ensues with Nicholas Cage. Known as uova fritte nel pane in Italy, it’s a dish that once graced many an Italian-American plate in the first half of the 20th century.
Still, we may never know the true origin of other nom de plumes for this crispy egg sandwich of sorts, let alone the namesakes behind them, such as for the “one-eyed Jack,” or the “one-eyed Pete.” Or exactly why it would ever be called a “cowboy egg.” And whether “Rocky Mountain Toast” was dubbed in Colorado, Montana, or Wyoming. Though “bulls eye eggs” feels obvious.
To make matters even more confusing, similar terms, like “egg-in-a-basket” and “egg-in-a-nest,” are also commonly used for those baked egg-hash brown breakfast cups that consume the pages of Pinterest, while the aforementioned amphibian appellations are actually more accurately a British dish of sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding.
And what about “egg-with-a-hat,” which appeared in Fannie Farmer’s lauded Boston Cooking School Cookbook, starting in the 1890s? Now that’s just ridiculous.
In lieu of any one true nativity story, perhaps the better question is: what’s in a name, anyways?”
Whether it’s served with white or wheat or sourdough, with its middle is cut out by a cookie cutter or biscuit cutter or whatever knife you have on hand, with yolks as bright as a canary or dark as an oriole, topped with just salt and pepper or hot sauce or Worcestershire or pimento cheese (as done by those readers in the comment section of The New York Times’ recipe), this pan-toasted-bread-with-a-fried-egg-inside could simply be known as a great unifier.
Even with dozens of names, these mystery eggs continue to comfort us across centuries and cultures. And whether they’re eaten in a city walkup or over a country sink or outside in the mountain air, they always taste like wherever we came from—like that first time we had them, all those years ago.
They might simply need no language, as all that’s really required is a hot cast-iron pan and some basic pantry staples. A spatula doesn’t hurt either.
After all, for most cooks, silence—albeit a few oohs and ahhs—is the greatest form of flattery.
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If you’re reading this, one way or another, you are part of the Butter Pat family. Maybe you recently bought your first pan, or are still weighing a purchase, or have collected the whole kit and caboodle—bless your hearts.
Either way, it’s worth knowing what to do when you finally get that piece of cast iron in your possession. Unfortunately, the internet has added a bunch of misnomers and malarkey to the process; there is no need to involve a potato, nor do you need to strip your pan or reseason it.
Instead, just follow these simple instructions:
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it many times again—the first thing you need to do after opening your box is clean your damn pan. Wash it with water, with soap, before fully drying it, and adding a touch of refined oil. At first, a gentle rinse will do, but over time, you can scrub the heck out of it. During those intensive cleanings, some of your seasoning might disappear in the process, but that’s okay—you’re working toward a progressive patina, it won’t happen overnight. Keeping your pan clean helps keep a smooth surface. What kind of soap? Any, though we tend to use those akin to Dawn. And how about dishwashers? Hard no.
This is a crucial step, whether you’re breaking in your new pan or cleaning between meals. And we only recommend one way: immediately after washing, heat your pan on the stove.
In a matter of minutes or seconds, depending on the strength of your stove, this will evaporate any residual water, which causes rust—aka the arch nemesis of iron. Don’t leave it in the sink. Don’t let it air dry. Forgo paper towels and dish cloths, which always leave behind some moisture. Rust doesn’t mean the death of your pan, but it’s best to avoid it for the flavor of your food and the longevity of your pan. If some appears, don’t panic, and see our Use and Care page for more instructions.
Oil to your just-washed cast iron is like a coat of wax on your just-cleaned car. It helps protect the smooth surface we worked hard to achieve and, over time, the non-stick seasoning that you’ve spent hours in the kitchen or over the fire working toward. Immediately after drying, while the pan is still warm, lightly coat all surfaces with a thin layer of refined oil. We prefer refined canola, but any refined variety will do. Unrefined oils, like butter and many olive oils, are more likely to go rancid between meals. Now your pan is ready to be stored or, better yet, fired up for supper!
It’s one of our most frequently asked questions: what should I cook first in my new cast iron? The answer is, anything, really—anything that fills the pan, uses oil or fat, and gets cooked at a consistently high heat, preferably at 500 degrees and in your oven. This helps seal in that next layer of seasoning and set you off on the right foot. In the Lili, roast a chicken with some vegetables. In the Heather or Estee, try your hand at cornbread. The Homer? Popcorn, hands down. Whatever you do, keep it simple to start. Avoid sticky dishes, like mac-and-cheese, or low-and-slow meals, like eggs and bacon. Then wash, dry, oil, and repeat.
We know they’re pretty, but Butter Pats aren’t meant to sit in the kitchen. Our pans are exceptionally smooth, but the more you use them, the more you build their seasoning into a truly non-stick surface, and the better and better they will be to cook with. So get started.
Cooking with cast iron shouldn’t be rocket science. For the most part, you’re not going to ruin your pan, unless you do something truly stupid (guilty, at times—ask us about that one summer storm or the ad-hoc dog bowl). But if you take decent care of it, it will last a long, long time. Generations, actually. A few more pointers:
For more tips, tricks, and recipes, visit butterpatindustries.com.
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Last year, while wrangling a portable cooktop around our kitchen, we thought it might be time to pull together a primer on induction. In our quest to gauge the likelihood of its longevity—and the degree to which we’ll need to acclimate—we sought to better understand the pros and cons of these flame-free appliances.
But back then, we couldn’t have fully foreseen how big of a talking point this would become in such a short matter of time, as a great debate would soon emerge over the future of our beloved gas stoves.
Not only does it turn out that our affinity for them is at least partially a byproduct of aggressive lobbying and advertising campaigns from the natural gas industry, dating back to the 1930s, but they’re also not good for us—their blue blazes emitting greenhouse gases into the environment, as well as noxious fumes around our own homes.
So much so that the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering regulatory action against gas-fueled gadgets in the face of growing research about the hazards that they pose to human health.
Which earlier this year sparked a noticeable uproar as politicians pushed back—not unlike in the early 19th century, when the rise of cookstoves as a replacement for open hearths was deemed literally sacrilege, as if taking the soul out of the kitchen. With a perhaps unintentional food pun, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia tweeted, “This is a recipe for disaster. The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.”
Not that we completely disagree. As cities and states propose and enact gas-stove bans across the U.S., we’re increasingly forced to reckon the reality that it’s going to be a gray day if we have to pull the plug on our vintage 1946 Garland. And while we don’t know when that might be, we decided to get a jumpstart by turning to our chef friends—aka those folks who have been using induction more often and for a lot longer than we have—for their two cents.
For the most part, they like them, much like food writer Alison Roman, who made headlines when she tweeted that “I have an induction stove by choice,” also noting that she usually uses it with cast iron and doesn’t do much wok cooking anyways. (The rounded cookware bottom poses a problem for induction’s electromagnetic power, which requires a physical connection between the pan bottom and power source.)
“We use them a lot—they’re quiet, they’re fast, they’re easy to keep clean, they’re portable, and when you get a good unit, they’re very dependable,” says Harley Peet, executive chef of the fine-dining Bluepoint Hospitality Group in our local Easton, Maryland, whose Ward Room restaurant is pictured above. “What’s not to like?”
Fair enough.
And still, we can’t help but feel somewhat wary of the steady march—from campfires to hearths to stoves to microwaves to induction—to a more mechanical, standardized, and somewhat dehumanized experience of cooking.
But for now, here are some of their takeaways:
Induction creates a more hospitable cooking environment.
Humans have long had a love-hate relationship with the open flame, and gas stoves are no different. Chefs and home cooks relish their speed, adjustability, and perhaps their primal connection to our past.
But whether we like it or not, gas stoves release the likes of methane, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide into the air around us, increasing the risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease in those who marinate in them.
On top of that, they’re not efficient, losing some 60 percent of their heat between burner and cookware, compared to electric’s 25 percent, and induction’s mere 10. This also makes our kitchens hotter, especially in restaurant settings, where chefs have been known to need to cool off in their walk-ins.
“For a professional chef, a kitchen full of induction is the difference between saving or shaving seven years off your life,” says James Beard Award-winning chef Sean Brock, whose flagship restaurant Audrey features roughly a dozen CookTek induction units, in addition to a live-fire hearth. “The comfort and temperature difference are night and day.”
Hoods help alleviate some of these issues, but not all kitchens are created equal, and induction offers an alternative for those without proper ventilation, which can be expensive to install.
Meanwhile, their glass-ceramic surfaces, though susceptible to scratching or cracking, are also easier to clean than the grates and gullies of a gas or electric-coil stovetop.
“We wipe them down and scrub them with soap, water, and Brillo,” says David Guas, chef-owner of Bayou Bakery in Arlington, Virginia, who uses Iwatani units in his gas-less kitchen.
Portability affords flexibility.
Current induction units range from portable burners to built-in stovetops, with the former being especially common in professional kitchens, providing chefs a certain amount of adaptability throughout their prep time or meal service. Many options are both compact and lightweight, and in some cases, all you need is an outlet (but more on that later).
“In professional kitchens like mine, where the menu changes often, we use a lot of single-burner induction units that you can plug into the wall and move all around the kitchen,” says Brock, who has both portable and built-in options. “At any given time, there are several induction burners scattered throughout our building.”
Which in many ways makes a chef’s job easier.
“It really has opened up a door as far as a whole new way of time management,” says Peet, who uses portable CookTek and Vollrath units across six of his company’s nine restaurants. “If somebody’s making something that requires constant attention, instead of having to keep walking over to the stove continuously, they could be in the back prepping, fabricating a fish or other protein, and also have a stock or sauce or consommé or reduction reducing on an induction burner right there next to them.”
Not all units are created equal.
In general, induction cooktops ain’t cheap, ranging from a hundred to a few thousand dollars and on upwards, with high-end built-in units peaking five digits, and most all being more expensive than their gas and electric alternatives.
“Some restaurants have stoves that cost as much as new cars, and some of the best induction options are pretty expensive for the average consumer, unless they’re avid cooks,” says Opie Crooks, culinary director for the FARM Hospitality Group in Savannah, who has used CookTech units and The Control Freak by PolyScience.
Luckily, demand is driving down price, with all the major appliance companies—Viking, Wolf, GE, LG, Samsung, KitchenAid, Kenmore, Miele—getting in on the induction game. Which naturally comes with a spectrum of quality.
“It’s like anything else: there are shit ones, there are good ones, sometimes they break—we did burn up a couple and had one deemed a lemon out of the factory,” says Peet, whose partner is a commercial kitchen designer. “But I think over the next year or so, we’ll have a lot more information, as more people get into induction and more options break into the market.”
Such as brands from Europe, where, as in Asia, this type of cooking has been commonplace for decades, with some all-induction restaurants earning three Michelin stars.
Making the switch sometimes can require updates to a kitchen’s electrical system, as most units require higher voltage outlets, which bring an additional expense. Increasingly, both restaurateurs and developers are building out their new spaces for this possibility.
Cookware matters.
Your pans need to be compatible with induction—meaning that they are conductive, aka ferrous, aka containing iron, aka innately magnetic—which includes many stainless and carbon steel options and, of course, all cast iron (including the enameled stuff). Put a magnet on the bottom; if it sticks, you’re good to go.
“Because we use so much induction, every pot or pan that we purchase has to work with induction,” says Brock, who relies on Made In stainless steel and Butter Pat cast iron.
To use non-compatible cookware—such as copper, aluminum, and Calphalon—cast-iron plates can serve as a go-between. Some companies have also incorporated layers of other metals into their products to make them induction-friendly.
Of note: though cast iron is a perfect pairing, it is also a slow, steady conductor of heat, meaning it’s less quick to respond than other metals, meaning it takes it’s time to both heat up and cool down, ultimately curbing the immediacy often touted about induction. But once the cookware does reach temperature, it holds it well, and for long periods of time, which will bring us to our next takeaway.
“The initial heating may take a couple of extra minutes,” says Peet, who pairs his induction with our cast iron, plus Mauviel stainless steel and Du Buyer carbon steel, “but it's well worth it to get that final result.”
It’s a decision for precision.
Accuracy, consistency, precision—these are a few of the words that often come up when talking about the wonder of induction.
Instead of low-to-high settings, the technology uses numbers to represent levels of heat, which are, with the twist of a knob, both exact and repeatable. And while this practice lacks the art of, say, building a fire or manipulating a coal bed, it does allow for precise temperature control and the enhanced ability to perfect a recipe over time.
“With a gas stove, you’re using intuition, but with induction, there’s no room for someone’s interpretation of low to medium to high heat—it’s an assigned number, so the consistency is there, every single time,” says Brock. “I can write a recipe: turn the knob to 20, do this, turn it to 11, and do that, then turn it to five, and do this. You can set an induction burner to whatever temperature you need, and it will hold it there.”
Which is why these cooktops are turned to for sous vide, simmering, and other low-and-slow techniques.
“It’s great for things that don’t need to be actively cooked but do need an exact, consistent, and constant temperature—things like stocks and reductions,” says Crooks, who saves searing for the wood fire.
“Boiling pasta, blanched vegetables, the start of our roux, soft-poaching eggs, etc.,” lists Guas as a few common uses, finding induction particularly helpful when cooking with sugar, such as making syrups, caramels, and desserts like Italian meringue or praline.
“We use it for a little bit of everything—heating, reheating, warming, hot holding, sautéing, braising, all of it,” says Peet. “My chef de cuisine is confiting duck legs on one as we speak.”
Practice makes perfect.
As you might expect, transitioning to induction does come with a learning curve, particularly for those using them technically as their sole cooking source.
For starters, there are the numeric settings. But even more difficult, there is a newfound lack of the visual cues that we’ve grown so accustomed to when cooking. No hot surface. No rise and fall of a flame. No red glow of an electric cooktop. In fact, this has posed such a problem that some manufacturers have started adding virtual flames and other lighting features to help indicate its heat.
“You cook with all of your senses—you might move things around or pull the pan off or to the side—but you can’t really see or feel the heat of the fire in the moment with induction,” says Crooks. “It almost takes the cooking out of it. You lose a bit of that human instinct. You have to rely on trusting the unknown.” (Aka the machines.)
And then there’s the fact that as soon as you remove the pan from the cooking surface—when shaking a pot of popcorn or flipping an omelet—that magnetic connection is broken, thus cutting off the power.
“We’ve combatted that issue by finding the units that are designed for a few-second delay, that way you can flip your pasta and set it back down without having to reset anything—it just picks right back up where you left off,” says Peet, whose Ward Room is run entirely on induction. “But it does takes some getting used to—you don’t get a new car and know what every button does, it takes a few months to figure out all the gadgets and gizmos.”
Or, as Brock puts it, not unlike how he describes cooking with cast iron: “If you don’t know how to drive a Ferrari, it’ll get away from you.”
For him, induction is just another feather in his culinary quiver.
“It’s an extension,” he says. “We still do 90 percent of our cooking in the hearth.”
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It was another long, strange year on Planet Earth, but luckily, amidst the madness of the human race, it was full of fine food, drink, books, music, and much more. We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite as a parting gift to all of you. Happy cooking, and happy New Year, y’all.
WHAT WE’VE LISTENED TO
West Virginia singer-songwriter Sierra Ferrell. Fresh Air with Terry Gross on your local NPR radio station. All the podcasts, including The Daily, to pair with your morning coffee, Radiolab, to release your inner nerd, Rumble Strip, for a wonderful window into everyday life in rural Vermont, and The Friendship Onion, from Billy Boy and Dom Monaghan of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
WHAT WE’VE READ
Coming to My Senses by Alice Waters. How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K Fisher. Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison. “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?” by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, which you’ll be thinking about long after. “Lester Young’s Christmas Comeback” by music critic Ted Gioia on Substack—a fascinating story about the last recordings of a great saxophone player, recorded at The Patio in Washington D.C.
WHAT WE’VE WATCHED
The World Cup (duh). Plus binging The Bear on Hulu, continuing the fourth season of Danish political drama Borgen on Netflix, and on a flight to and from Paris, falling for Hacks on HBO Max.
WHERE WE’VE EATEN
Clare de Boer’s perfect Stissing House in upstate New York. Greg Collier’s Leah & Louise for Southern comfort in Charlotte. Jeremiah Langhorne’s The Dabney and Opie Crooks’ No Goodbyes in Washington, D.C., for elevated Mid-Atlantic cuisine. Sally’s Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut (if you know, you know). Tacos Apson in Tucson—perhaps the best al pastor in the United States of America. And as often as we can, at Sean Brock’s Audrey, in Nashville.
WHAT WE’VE DRANK
Oyster River Winegrowers from Maine. A final pint from Bertha’s Mussels in Baltimore. Ghia, a non-alcoholic aperitif. Too many canned Le Colombes.
WHAT WE’VE COOKED FROM
Tartine All Day. Matty Matheson: A Cookbook. Nik Sharma’s The Flavor Equation. New Orleans’ Mosquito Supper Club and Turkey and the Wolf. Ronni Lundy’s Victuals. The New York Times cooking section.
WHAT WE’VE COOKED (A LOT OF)
Banana bread in the Heather! Pizza in the Lili! Alison Roman’s “brothy beans.” Hank Shaw’s game terrine. All the croutons. And one customer’s grandmother’s recipe for Lima bean soup (thanks, Alex).
WHAT WE’VE KEPT IN OUR KITCHENS
Duke’s Mayonnaise, Soom tahini, Snake Oil hot sauce from chef Spike Gjerde, Marsh Hen Mill grits, small-batch Carolina Ground flour (on the advice of our friend Keia Mastrianni of Milk Glass Pie in the Old North State), Rancho Gordo royal corona beans.
WHAT TOOLS WE’VE USED
A E. Dehillerin carbon steel chef’s knife, a Robot Coupe food processor, Yeti coolers, pizza peels.
WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR AT BP
We released the Joe! We moved our shop! We bought a house, we lost a father, we gardened, we traveled (again (finally)), and we spent time fundraising for family members in Ukraine.
WHAT’S COMING NEXT
Cypress wood drop lids. To be used like a French parchment cartouche. It will change how you sauté.
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Eating season is upon us. With cooler temperatures comes a primal desire to fire up our kitchens, and this time of year, few recipes warm the bones and help us weather the coming days of winter quite like confit.
Here on the Chesapeake Bay, we start thinking about this dish when, suddenly, the cacophonous chorus of waterfowl arrives on the nation’s largest estuary. From now until spring, the air fills with the whistles, chatters, hoots, honks, and outright quacks of ducks and geese who make themselves at home and, a few times a season, if we’re lucky, end up our tables, too.
Confit de canard (duck) and confit de oie (goose) are two classic variations of the traditional French technique—pronounced “kon-FEE” and derived from the verb confire, which simply means “to preserve.” Almost any food can be confit’ed—meat, fish, vegetables, even fruit—and yet it remains an intimidating process for many home cooks. For that, we’re here to level the playing field, especially because it makes the perfect pairing with cast iron.
To begin, let’s look at the origins of confit. The age-old preservation technique dates back to as early as the 15th century and is thought to hail from the southwest of France, in the region of Gascogne or Gascony, which is also revered for its foie gras and duck fat and has been dubbed by The New York Times as possibly “the most delicious corner” of its home country. (Apparently hand-written signs advertise farm-made confit along the roadside—BRB, checking flights…)
But in the age before refrigeration, French hunters and cooks turned to confit as a way to extend the shelf life of their harvests and market hauls to last them through the lean times. In essence, meat was salted and then low-and-slow cooked in its own fat which protected it for months-long storage. It was a practice born out of necessity, but just so happened to be delicious.
So how does this work, exactly?
When it comes to meat, common cuts are usually legs of poultry such as duck or goose, and the first step is the salt cure. A generous portion of salt is mixed with aromatics, such as black pepper, thyme, bay leaves, juniper berries, or, per one Julia Child recipe, allspice. The mixture is then rubbed over the meat, which is then sealed in a container or dish and left to sit for at least one hour or, refrigerated, as much as overnight or even a few days. Outdoorsman Hank Shaw of Duck, Duck, Goose cookbook fame recommends using kosher or sea salt, at a rate of no more than two percent of the meat’s weight to avoid oversalting. Salt ultimately draws moisture out of the meat, making it less likely to spoil, while also concentrating the flavor.
The second step is the fat. Removing the meat from its salt cure, rinsing it clean, and patting it dry, it is now ready for bath time. The meat is then submerged in fat—again, duck or goose fat are best, but chicken fat or olive oil will also do—and if you’re feeling fancy, you can throw in some garlic and rosemary, too. The fat-covered meat is then cooked low and slow, with many modern recipes calling for a 200-degree Fahrenheit oven and at least three hours of cooking.
Traditionally, this was done in an earthen crock, then later, an ovenproof dish like a cast-iron pan or casserole. Even more recently, vacuum sealers and sous vide machines have made the process all the easier. Ultimately, the fat creates a protective barrier, sealing out oxygen that bacteria need to grow, while also sealing in flavor and moisture. Meanwhile, the cooking method helps break down connective tissue in typically tough cuts, yielding an especially tender end product.
Speaking of end product, what do you do with confit once it is, well, confit’ed?
Once cooked, confit will only get better with age, and it can be stored in a sealed container in a cool, dark place – aka your fridge’s meat drawer – for up to several months. From there, it is often scraped clean of excess fat and incorporated into traditional dishes, such as cassoulets or rillettes.
You can also mix it into sauces, stuff it into raviolis, or shred it over nachos or into tacos (traditional carnitasis essentially the confit of Mexico). We personally like to pull the meat, crisp it up in a cast-iron pan, and serve it over frisée aux lardons salad with a jammy egg.
We also like to confit those other things we almost overlooked: vegetables. There might be nothing better than a bunch of spring alliums—like garlic or onions—or summer nightshades—like tomatoes or eggplant—swimming in a warm pool of olive oil and herbs, then smeared over fresh sourdough, perhaps with a dollop of ricotta.
But for the next few months, in our neck of the woods, if we’re lucky, it’s all things duck confit.
]]>Imagine this: You’re stuck in the middle of the desert with a broken-down vehicle and nothing to eat but one damn egg. Which would be easier, frying it on the hot glass of your car windshield or the rugged asphalt on which you stand? Simply put, smoothness impacts your cooking, your seasoning, your cleaning. It matters, indeed.
]]>You hear us talking pretty often about one particular word. We extoll its virtues when we speak of cooking, and cleaning, and seasoning, and what sets our pans apart. But while it sounds nice, like a dog’s coat or a suede jacket, there’s a good chance that you have no idea why we won’t stop yammering on about smoothness.
Simply put, smoothness matters.
Let’s begin with the basics: run your hand across the surface of the various pieces of cookware in your kitchen. You’ll notice that each feels a little different, and some more dramatically than others. The base of your copper pots could be like a car windshield, while certain cast irons could feel like an exfoliating trip to the spa. We’re somewhere in the middle, with a touch of our pan’s surface having the slightest reminiscence of velvet. That’s the way the old Griswolds and Wagners and Favorites felt. Buttery, supple—smooth. Like a fine piece of craftsmanship.
Now, why does this matter?
Well, let’s go back to that car windshield. Imagine you’re stuck in the middle of the desert with a broken-down vehicle and nothing to eat but one damn egg. Which would be easier, frying it on the hot glass of your car windshield or the rugged asphalt on which you stand? (We promise: one day, we’re going to actually do this to a prove a point.)
The glass, duh. Because a rough surface has tons of tiny divots for food to creep in and adhere to, whereas a smooth, continuous surface will cook it with far less sticking.
But can’t you achieve the same end with a rough pan if you add enough seasoning? The answer is: sure. With enough fat or oil on top, that desert road could temporarily become a flattop grill, with the food you’re cooking simply floating on, and oftentimes bathing in, those lipids.
Similarly, with enough time and use, layers of seasoning can eventually fill in and level out a sandpapery pan. But it has to be maintained. If you strip off some seasoning, you’re back to that original rough surface, with part of your egg sticking to the grit, and the rest frying perfectly fine on the nice buildup of fat that came with lots of cooking. Do this on an already smooth pan, and it’ll go more, well, smoothly.
Another reason why smoothness matters: it helps build seasoning, too.
Here’s a second analogy: If you buy an old house in need of a touchup, would it be easier to paint fresh lumber or existing siding with its lacquered coats of yore?
The lumber, duh. Lay that color on a smooth surface and it adheres in a uniform fashion. Lay it on something lumpy and it’s prone to peel and chip. And we know nobody, and we mean nobody, enjoys sanding back down to wood.
Speaking of sanding, most cast-iron companies today use a similar process to create their final products. In the industry, the term is known as “machining,” where a coarse surface is machine-milled into something level and flat. Other times, more crudely, they are “hogged out,” where a mass of metal is literally hollowed out to create the shape of a pan, with a lot of material ending up in the trash. We're not naming any names.
When done right, these processes do, in fact, make a smooth surface, but they can also create microscopic crevices, as well as uneven thickness throughout the pan, as easily seen when looking at them (see above). It’s not the end of the world, visually, but this does ultimately create hotspots for cooking, aka those tricky areas of irregular heat transfer that tend to burn your egg yolk before the white is finished cooking or burn your steak before its medium rare. And all the while, the exterior remains rough, which can scratch your stove and counters.
Butter Pats, on the other hand, are cast smooth, on all sides, meaning they come out of the molds as smooth as you receive them—and sometimes even smoother! Which is why we continue to get high scores for even heat and even cooking from the experts that be. Not bragging. Just facts.
Smoothness impacts your cooking. Smoothness impacts your seasoning, which also impacts your cooking. So yes, smoothness matters.
Of course, nothing good ever comes easy. Casting smooth is a difficult process, one perfected over years and inspired by other centuries, when all pans were made this way, which, then as now, was only possible with the human hand. But today, fewer and fewer foundries retain the old know-how to actually do it, which makes the final product—aka our pans—more expensive.
Cheaper is often a byproduct of faster, which does not always mean better, and casting smooth takes time, with modern, machine-made pans taking as little as 90 minutes to make, whereas each one of ours sits in the molds for at least 24 hours, taking 21 days from start to finish. It’s a difference you can literally see, feel, and eventually, taste.
This is why we also encourage you to keep your cast iron clean. You paid a lot of money for us to make a pan this smooth. Help yourself keep it that way, by not leaving behind those extra undulating layers of crud that can come with certain meals.
Use water. Use soap. Dry it off well. Then do it all over again.
Smooth cooking, y’all.
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What’s in a recipe? There are the ingredients, of course, and the method, too. For most modern humans, this is common knowledge, but there was a time, not that long ago, when that six-letter word that rules our kitchens was something quite different–and, at one point, not even a word at all.
]]>What’s in a recipe? There are the ingredients, of course, and the method, too. For most modern humans, this is common knowledge, but there was a time, not that long ago, when that six-letter word that rules our kitchens was something quite different–and, at one point, not even a word at all.
It’s one of our favorite etymological evolutions: as many a great-grandparent can still tell you, before there were recipes, there were, what we then called, receipts.
Today, we think of the former as what we use to make our favorite casseroles and cornbreads and chocolate-chip cookies, while the latter brings to mind that too-long piece of paper that we shove into our pockets at check-out.
But this has not always been the case.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, both words derive from recipere, or the Latin verb meaning “to receive or take.” Receipt is technically the older word, dating at least back to the 1300s, when it appeared in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in reference to a medicinal preparation. Similarly, though some few hundred years later, the first known use of recipe would also appear in place of what we now call a prescription—eventually abbreviated to the present-day “Rx” as seen on a doctor’s notepad.
By the 16th century, the concept of a receipt had expanded to mean any sort of “statement documenting the receiving of money or goods,” per Webster—be it for painkillers or a pound of butter or a mule—and by the 17th, though the details seem lost to history, both terms began being used to describe the instructions for cooking food.
By the late 19th century, however, changes were afoot, perhaps set in stone by the 1896 The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, in which domestic scientist Fannie Merritt Farmer referred to her seminal tome’s contents as “tried and tested recipes.” (More on Ms. Farmer later.)
Still, receipts remained in vogue into the middle of the 20th century, but they would eventually drift into obsolescence—an adage of the past, carried on only thanks to those elder relatives who passed the term, and undoubtedly the recipes, down to their kin.
“Receipt has a more distinguished ancestry,” wrote Baltimore-born socialite Emily Post in her 1922 Etiquette, “but since recipe is used by all modern writers on cooking, only the immutables insist on receipt.”
Indeed, recipes would come to be the term used in Irma Rombauer’s original 1931 Joy of Cooking, in Julia Child’s pivotal 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in the many essays and books written between the 1940s and 1970s by pioneering American food writer M.F.K. Fisher. And the rest should be history.
Except for the fact that, all the while, the actual anatomy of a recipe—which we shall call it from hence forth—was undergoing a revolution of its own.
Today, whether you’re reading a cookbook on Southern food or California cooking or Native American or Korean or Kenyan cuisine, recipes, more often than not (we see you, Sam Sifton’s No-Recipe Recipes), appear in an almost identical format. As said before, there are the ingredients, and the method, and usually, the number of people this dish will serve. They are chronologically ordered and clearly detailed so as to be easily replicated.
“A recipe is supposed to be a formula, a means prescribed for producing a desired result, whether that be an atomic weapon, a well-trained Pekingese, or an omelet,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher in her 1969 “The Anatomy of a Recipe.” “There can be no frills about it, no ambiguities, and above all, no ‘little secrets.’ A cook who indulges in such covert and destructive vanity . . . no deep-fat kettle is too hot to brown him in.”
But again, this has not always been the case.
The earliest known recipes were inscribed on tablets from Mesopotamia, with others found from ancient Egypt, China, and Greece, but back then, and for most of the millennia thereafter, much of society was illiterate, meaning they didn’t tend to write such things down. Instead, cooking knowledge was more commonly picked up through experience, passed down among generations, or only shared between fellow cooks—many of whom, for the better part of the last few centuries, were women.
As literacy emerged during the Age of Enlightenment, so, too, did the precursors of our modern-day recipes, then largely consisting of just a few sentences based on general approximations—“a dash of this,” “a dollop of that”—and basic assumptions—“a hot oven,” “cook until done”—of the hard-earned culinary wisdom of those aforementioned cooks.
See the circa-1814 recipe for fried squirrel from our state’s beloved Maryland’s Way: “Prepare and cut up in pieces as you would a rabbit. Dredge in flour well-seasoned with salt and pepper. Brown in bacon fat. Add a little water, cover and steam for an hour or more until tender.”
In short, for quite some time, recipes were vague, imprecise, and based on a since-forgotten rule of thumb. That is until the Industrial Revolution, which brought forth an era of standardization of weights and measurements that would ultimately revolutionize the way we cooked—and ate.
With the help of such new tools as measuring cups, spoons, thermometers, and clocks, combined with pioneering women like early feminist educator Catharine Beecher and the aforementioned Farmer—arguably the mother of the modern-day recipe format—recipes soon became more methodical, scientific, and therefore reliable. Ingredients were now listed in tablespoons, cups, quarts, and other numbers. Method was now explained with specific detail and guided instruction.
“[Miss Farmer] was the kiss of death, one would assume, to such sloppy recipe writing as kept on being published for brides like my maternal grandmother, who’s copy of Marion Harlan‘s best-selling manual, Common Sense in the Household, first published in 1871, is inscribed by an older brother: ‘Improve each shining hour,’” mused Fisher in ’69.
She’s referring to the fact that in the years leading up to the Farmer cookbook, American recipes were largely written for middle- and upper-class housewives, most of whom were white and many of whom, following the Civil War, no longer with a kitchen full of help.
But American society was also beginning to grow increasingly mobile, with the Western expansion luring settlers toward the frontier, the Great Migration relocating African Americans across the country from the deep South, and the eventual World War efforts drawing rural populations to burgeoning cities. Written recipes became a way to preserve personal history.
Along the way, thousands of cooks were born, with their recipes continuing to evolve—with us—to this day.
In a section titled “Some Words of Advice” in the foreword of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child, along with her co-writers Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, offer some recommendations that still ring true: read the recipe first, pay attention, take your time, pre-heat your oven, dirty every pot and pan you need, use your hands…
“Keep your knives sharp,” they conclude, before adding: “Above all, have a good time.”
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There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who like mayonnaise, and the blasphemous ones who don’t. We, like any good Southerner, are unapologetic about our adoration of this simple condiment, about our personal pantry stockpile, about its inarguable place on every sandwich. After all, it is the secret to every good grilled cheese you’ve ever eaten, especially when cooked in a cast-iron pan.
]]>We, like any good Southerner, are unapologetic about our adoration of this simple condiment, about our insistence on its inarguable place on every sandwich, about our pantry stockpile— always at the ready with at least two jars. It is the secret to every good grilled cheese you’ve ever eaten, especially when cooked in a cast-iron pan.
In South Carolina and Tennessee, where we come from, mayonnaise—the simple fusion of eggs, oil, and acid—makes its way into many a dish and is the secret to most sauces. Though said to be the invention of a French chef in 1756, as far as we’re concerned, mayo has become the American, and in many ways the penultimate Southern, culinary accoutrement.
In all honesty, is there any condiment more contentious than mayonnaise? Between its proponents and its opponents, and worst yet, amongst its fan, between which kind of mayonnaise indeed.
There was Coke versus Pepsi, McDonald’s versus Burger King, Ford versus GM, Levi’s versus Wrangler, and we all know that Hellmann’s versus Duke’s is the cultural competition of the day, with northerners usually rooting for the former—among which Julia Child, Ina Garten, and Anthony Bourdain can be counted as admirers—and southerners firmly rooted in the latter, particularly these days. Nashville’s Sean Brock and New Orleans’ Mason Hereford all swear by the stuff.
It’s a debate so divided that, it has sparked news articles, rambling Reddit threads, and even some sparring on social media, with one unlikely tattoo contest for fans to show off their favorite. (Unsurprisingly, Duke’s won, with a Richmond tattoo parlor creating a coterie of yellow-capped artworks.)
Born in South Carolina, raised in Tennessee, let us start with a moment of truth. During our early years, we didn’t eat Duke’s—the official cool kids of mayo; we ate Miracle Whip. We know, we know, but we’ll also call a bunch of you from our neck of the woods and over a certain age who suggest anything otherwise. In fact, until just a few years ago, those black, white, and gold labels were barely sold beyond the Carolinas and Georgia. Luckily, we came around.
But wherever you hail from, it could be argued that Duke’s came first, arriving in 1917 when the grand dame Eugenia Duke began selling 10-cent sandwiches with her homemade slather to soldiers at Fort Sevier in South Carolina. Hellmann’s arrived three years later, with a delicatessen in the heart of Manhattan, New York. Within a few years, both brands started selling their signature sauces, and soon enough, the sweet Kraft salad dressing of our youth would come online, too, making its debut at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, after which America would never be the same.
With World War II, mayonnaise became a vital ingredient while eggs and oil were rationed. It was used as a base for cakes and dressings and a go-to binder for myriad recipes. In the mid-century decades that followed, mayonnaise would firmly cement itself into American cuisine, even though its origins date back further and farther away.
The origin story of mayonnaise is almost as controversial as its modern-day predicament, this time a battle in Europe. France says one of their own invented it after the capture of the Port of Mahon (in Minorca, Spain, no less), from whence it gets its namesake. Spain, of course, counters that it was first developed by that city’s local residents invented it.
Still, the etymological mystery continues, with Larousse Gastronomique suggesting that the name may just be a bastardized moyeunaise, derived from the Old French moyeu for “egg yolk,” while others still suggest it should actually be bayonnaise, for the French-Basque town of Bayonne.
Either way, it is likely rooted in that border between the two countries, in its predecessor, aioli—an emulsion of garlic, oil, and salt—which has been made in southwestern France (with a hint of lemon) and northeastern Spain (with a touch of heat) since at least its time in the Roman Empire.
Still, pioneering French chef Marie-Antoine Carême would cement the spread’s role into haute, and in turn, American cuisine. By the 19th century, it would wind its way onto fancy menus up and down the East Coast, perhaps starting at Delmonico’s in 1838, but eventually finding itself in the likes of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, circa 1896. Suddenly everything became a salad, and before long, with the invention of the mechanical bread slicer in the 1920s, a sandwich, and the rest is history.
Today, no picnic or potluck would be complete without the help of this both luxurious and humble staple. For us, it is requisite for Thanksgiving leftovers. For the Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore barbecue sauce. For the culinary gift that is pimento cheese dip. For every burger, for BLTs, and, best of all, the rare perfection that is a thick swipe between two slices of white bread with a ripe summer tomato.
These are undoubtedly the reasons why mayonnaise remains the best-selling condiment in the United States—over ketchup, over mustard, or its wannabe, ranch dressing (for which we also hold a soft spot).
With its cidery tang and lack of sugar, Duke’s will always be our number one, but there’s also a time and a place for Kewpie, and in a pinch, we won’t stick our nose up at Hellmann’s—unless another Southerner is looking.
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These are some of life’s greatest mysteries:
Why can we sit around a campfire for hours, our gaze limitlessly entranced by the lick and hiss of a flame up toward the nighttime sky?
Why is it that steak, that fish, that vegetables will never taste better than when cooked on, or in, a blazing bed of coals?
Really, at the end of the day, even as it ravages large swaths of our countryside, though its smoke can kill us, and our kitchens continue to move towards more sleek, modern, homogenous technology that hides away all the good stuff, why are we so drawn to something as age old as fire?
“Civilization really begins around that cookfire,” says Michael Pollan in his Netflix series, Cooked, based on his book of the same name. “And even now, fire does draw us together.”
As we all know, millions of years ago, our ancestors survived by hunting and gathering, sating themselves through constant grazing of vegetation and consumption of raw meat in order to fuel their large bodies, block heads, and small brains.
The first fire-cooked meals were likely opportunistic—a wildfire leaving barbecued animals and plants in its wake and ripe for eating. Later evidence of fire cooking dates back some 400,000 years to Israeli caves, where indications of roasted meat remain, while as recently as 40,000 years ago, we can say for certain that flint and friction were used by man to make his or her own fire.
When early humans discovered cooking—which really is just the transformation of food, one way or another, through heat—meals were suddenly easier to eat. They didn’t require hours of chewing, they broke down more readily in our gut, and, of course, they tasted better.
Less time eating meant more time for socializing, which likely also aided our evolution into such communal creatures, and perhaps even played a role in the development of language, and likely as a result, our anatomy changed, too. Our brains got bigger, our teeth got smaller, our jaws got weaker, much more akin to what we look like in present day. And the rest is history—all thanks to the simple combination of fuel, heat, and oxygen into fire.
“The reason people love fire is because they have to love fire, because it makes them human,” says Mike Bertelsen of the Cowboy Cauldron Company, our sister company, noting that we are the only species to cook our food. “Because it includes all of the social interaction that we are designed to do as a species. And because, when you get food involved, that’s as primal as it gets. The only thing more rooted in our human behavior than cooking on fire is sex. That’s why people keep coming back to it—it’s simply the most satisfying.”
But unfortunately, in recent centuries, we’ve evolved away from it. Up until as recently as the 18th century, we cooked our food over an open flame, with heavy cauldrons and spider pots heated over a live fire or placed directly into the coals. In the 1790s, New England inventor (and one-time turncoat) Sir Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, would create the predecessor of the modern cookstove, forever hiding our kitchen and home’s heat source, or at least for the foreseeable future. Whether or not that’s progress is in the eye of the beholder.
“Behind every electric outlet, even behind every microwave oven, there is somewhere a fire burning, probably of fossil fuel, but it’s hidden from us,” said Pollan in Cooked. With a flame, at least, “It’s just right in front of us.”
For that, for most people, in the age of gas cooktops, sure, but even more so electric and increasingly induction cooking, not to mention the microwave and fast food, we no longer know how to cook with fire, and in fact, we have become afraid of it.
“The reason that pellet grills and Big Green Eggs are easy cooking devices is that most of the variables have been eliminated—they’re essentially just ovens,” says Bertelsen. “Newcomers to cooking with live fire are often intimidated because they are afraid of failure. I suggest keeping the stakes low, with sausages or burgers, until you get a sense of how it works. You still get all the fun, with very little potential for downside. Every time I build a fire, I get a little bit better.”
And of course, the reward is infinitely high, indeed, as old homo erectus taught us, as cooking—in general, but certainly with fire—yields some of the most flavorful forms of food.
First, there is the Maillard reaction, commonly referred to as “browning”—a seemingly simple but rather complicated set of chemical reactions that take place as food is cooked. At high temperatures—above that of boiling water—amino acids and sugars are altered, producing molecules that affect not just the color but also, most importantly, the complexity of flavor and aroma.
It’s why a fresh-baked loaf of bread is so much more intoxicating than a ball of dough. It’s why we salivate over a grilled burger, fried fish, or even sauteed vegetables in primitive ways that we just don’t for things that are raw, poached, steamed, or boiled. It’s why we throw a last-minute torch on our sous vide steaks.
Then, there is the smoke, which plays a particularly important role with indirect heat, when a hunk of brisket or a rack of ribs is marinated in a long, slow bath of wood essence—with compounds from the apple, the cherry, the mesquite, the oak helping to impart that characteristic smoked flavor. Purists argue over which kind is best.
With direct-heat cooking, on the other hand, it’s a moot point, according to the science-minded culinary bible that is Modernist Cuisine.
“Once the flames of ignition have died and the coals are glowing hot, neither briquettes nor hardwood charcoals have any flavor left to impart,” wrote authors Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, Maxime Bilet in the first chapter of their 2011 tome. “Any aromatic compounds the fuel once harbored were vaporized and destroyed long before the food was laid on the grill.”
Instead, they insist, in this instance, flavor comes less from the fuel than the food itself:
“Dribbles of juice laden with natural sugars, proteins, and oils fall onto the hot coals and burst into smoke and flame. By catalyzing myriad chemical reactions, the intense heat forges these charred juices into molecules that convey the aromas of grilling food. These new molecules literally go up in smoke, coating the food with the unmistakable flavor of grilled food.”
All we know is, it tastes damn good, whatever way you do it. And it’s a lot of fun along the way. And in this day and age, of all ages, we think more people should be gathering kindling, striking matches, firing up their grills and smokers and cauldrons.
For that, we’ve asked a few of our friends—experts of different forms of fire-based cooking—to share their wisdom on getting started.
ON GRILLING
—Jess Pryles, Hardcore Carnivore
Save time by starting with a charcoal chimney.
“All you have to do is fill it full of charcoal all the way to the top and then I usually put a fire lighter underneath and light it, and that’s it. You just leave it, and the whole chimney will eventually catch in about 10 to 15 minutes…Dump your coals out and you’re ready to grill.”
Pile your coals on one side for a two-zone system.
“That gives me a definitive hot and cool zone to grill on.…Where that comes in handy is with things like bacon or chicken wings things that usually burn on the grill, ’cause I can start them on that really high heat and then before they burn, I can move them across to the gentle heat to make sure they cook all the way through.”
It’s okay to cheat the system sometimes.
“I build wood fires in my offset smoker, but I usually start with a bit of charcoal still, just to give them a chance to catch. Most folks in Texas have pear burners and that’s what we use on most ranches for fires. A lot of the time the ye oldy ways of starting a fire have been outmoded by modern conveniences.”
ON WOOD FIRES
—Mike Bertelsen, Cowboy Cauldron Company
Use dry wood.
“Dry wood is key. Smokey fires really intimidate people. And most of the time, when you build a smokey, crappy fire, it’s because you used wet wood, which creates steam.”
You sit around a teepee. You cook on Lincoln logs.
“There are two styles of fire, really. The teepee fire is the bright campfire for when you want to see the flame reflected in the faces of the people around the fire. That’s the exact wrong thing to do for cooking. For cooking, you do Lincoln logs—you build a crosshatch, with good air flow—which will burn into a deep bed of coals and then give you the tool you need to cook on.”
Build a bigger fire than you think you need.
“Lots of folks only know artificial charcoal briquettes. They are designed to smolder, not burn. They don’t get very hot but last a long time. Real wood charcoal can get really hot but doesn’t last as long, so use more, or be ready to add extra if you need it. Even though real wood charcoal is a bit more expensive, the extra few dollars is worth it. It’s like buying better beer. As for my favorite wood - I prefer oak.”
ON SMOKING
—Max Frisbie, Mill Scale Metalworks
Take the time to burn that wood into coals.
“You’re really cooking with very little actual fire. The main goal is to create that ambient heat that radiates off the wood after it’s had a chance to burn down into those coals.”
Get good air flow.
“Start with a clean firebox where you can really get good air flow coming around and on all sides of the wood. The goal is, instead of that smoke sitting in one spot, you’re constantly having that hot air pulled across the product. This alleviates the smoke being stagnant and creating a product that is overly smoky. Think of it like the commercials on the aerodynamics of a moving car. We like to trim and shape the product we're cooking in a way that improves its aerodynamics and reduces drag in the cook chamber.”
Smoke your veggies.
“We got a case of gorgeous baby carrots and left them whole and filled the entire smoker with them, giving them a delicate smoke before finishing them on the grill. Smoke is as much of an ingredient as salt and pepper.”
“Just as the sacred cod of Massachusetts is the accepted emblem of the Bay State,” wrote legendary ecologist Rachel Carson in The Baltimore Sun in 1936, “so the shad may rightly be considered the piscatorial representative of the states bordering the Chesapeake.”
Though, during much of our lifetime, this iconic dish born out of a native fish did not, in fact, hail from this nation’s largest estuary, where, for centuries, the American shad, aka alosa sapidissima, was considered the most valuable and important fishery. Each spring, the native river herring once filled these brackish tributaries, from the Susquehanna River down to the Potomac and from there even into Appalachia, embarking on massive metallic migrations toward their expansive spawning grounds in the very same streams and rivers in which they were born. They were a staple part of the Native American diet, fed George Washington’s troops through rough winters of the Revolutionary War, and became the Chesapeake’s first commercial fishery.
Long before oysters, crab, and rockfish gained fame, shad ruled the Chesapeake—“the founding fish,” as it’s been called—and a vital link in the estuary’s food chain.
As in many American foodways, the culinary tradition surrounding this natural resource was formed in native tradition, when the rich, bony fish was butterflied onto cedar planks, then slow smoked over an open fire. The practice would live on for generations, becoming a staple of local festivals and political whistle-stop tours along the watershed communities.
“Our heart goes out in pity to those luckless Americans who know nothing of the Chesapeake shad,” wrote Baltimore bard H.L. Mencken in the Sun in 1907. “How any human alive can live on, year after year, without the prospect of a mess of planked shad in each succeeding spring to hearten and encourage him is more than we can understand. To us, existence without the noble king of fish would be unspeakable and unthinkable.”
Quite the foreshadowing statement, because by this time, the heyday of the American shad had already begun to wane as the United States continued to grow. Booming populations were building dams up and down the surrounding rivers to hydroelectrically power their burgeoning cities and industries, igniting “Shad Wars” between upstream and downstream residents over access to the natural resource, while forever altering the keystone species’ habitat and life cycle.
At the same time, as demand peaked, overfishing compounded the issue, with bigger boats carrying bigger nets able to haul in as much as 17 million pounds a year at the turn of the 20th century.
“The Bay is literally strewn with fishing gears, most of which are set to catch fish all day and all night, throughout the season, thus not giving [shad] access to the breeding grounds,” wrote the precursor the Department of Natural Resources in 1939.
Add to that pollution and climate change, and by the 1970s, harvests barely peaked two million pounds—a more than 88 percent decrease. It is likely that the rise of invasive scavenger species like blue catfish, and then later snakehead, didn’t help the cause, either.
By 1980, Maryland shuttered its shad season, followed by the bi-state Potomac River in 1989, and Virginia in 1994. And despite decades of commercial moratoriums and millions of dollars spent on restoration efforts, such as shad hatcheries and dam “fish lifts” across multiple states, those once-abundant populations remain at about one percent of their historic peaks.
Hence why we no longer indulge ourselves one of the East Coast’s greatest pleasures—with most shad roe these days hailing from the Carolinas or Georgia, where commercial seasons remain. Instead, we’ve shifted to a new spring ritual with more sustainable populations: perch, and its roe—dredged in a little flour and J.O. Spice, then sauteed in bacon grease, butter, and alliums, just like we used to. And we’re beginning to think about replacing our beloved rockfish for similar reasons.
Removal of the dams themselves might be the most likely solution for shad, such as the massive Conowingo Dam at the headwaters of the Chesapeake—where some 13,000 shad still try to migrate each season—though the owner, the Exelon Corporation, just renewed its operating license for the next 50 years.
By then, it might be too little, too late, as in 2020, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission designated shad populations as already “depleted” not just in the Chesapeake, but along the entire Eastern Seaboard.
Within a few weeks of this story going to press, many of the adult shad will already be on their way out of these waters, and by fall, the newly spawned shad— known as small “fry,” an idiom lineage that we just love—will follow, heading back toward the open ocean, where they will mature for several years before returning again some spring, continuing the ancient rhythms that have captivated us for centuries.
We’ll miss them on our plates but think of it as an offering to the river gods.
Besides, it won’t be long until crab season.
]]>There is one word that follows cast iron wherever it goes. Into every news article. Down every online rabbit hole. One that’s fought over by home cooks and experienced chefs. One that is omnipresent and irksome and, in general, a big, overly complicated, equally watered-down waste of hot air and time. And that, dear friends, is seasoning.
Ah, seasoning—the culinary buzzword of the 21st century—with so much dogma surrounding it. But, of course, don’t believe everything you read on the internet. So let us debunk a few myths and explain a few mysteries. (Spoiler alert: it’s easier than you’ve been made to believe.)
First of all, what is seasoning?
In scientific terms, seasoning is the process of polymerizing (aka a chemical reaction in which molecules bond together) and carbonizing (aka converting carbon into carbonic residue) of fat on iron in the presence of high heat.
Polymerization of fat creates a thin, hydrophobic layer that helps protect the naturally porous iron surface from water, and thus rust, while also providing the foundation for a non-stick surface. The carbon residue contributes to a more durable coating and that trademark dark color that just so happens to be a nice side effect. Both happen only if your fat gets hot enough to reach its smoke point—aka when it begins to smoke—which, depending on whether you’re using lard or Crisco, olive or peanut or grapeseed oil, can range from 200 to 500 degrees.
Have your eyes fallen out of your head yet?
In colloquial terms, seasoning has become known as that thick, rough, pitch-black surface of some grandmother’s cast iron—impossible to acquire without a thousand YouTubes, multi-generational Appalachian wisdom, and a touch of witchcraft.
Which all happens to be untrue.
One of the most frequently asked questions we get from new customers is why are their pans not black—an expectation largely hailing from those old, well-loved hunks of metal found in antique stores, or that ubiquitous Lodge cookware, which arrives the color of coal in part because of its sandpapery texture (which is a whole other science lesson we won’t bore you with now).
In reality, at its best, seasoning is not thick or rough at all.
It is multiple, thin layers—read a fraction of a millimeter in total—that are built up over time and buffed out between each meal for a more even coating, with scrubbers, soap, and all. Don’t fear losing that precious S-word in the process. Because guess what? It’ll come back the next time you use your pan.
In fact, many of the ones we use were never seasoned, just brought home silver straight from the factory and not missing a day in the kitchen ever since.
Our customers are right—our pans do not arrive black. But neither did Griswolds. Or Wagners. Or Favorites. In part, because they are smooth. But also because, despite being pre-seasoned into a luscious caramel color, they will still require the primary source of seasoning—cooking—to turn into that coffee color we have come to associate with a “seasoned” piece of cast iron.
By its very definition, seasoning takes time, like a good paint job or the patina on a pair of fine leather boots. It won’t look perfect right away, and its progress will depend on myriad factors, from your oil to your ingredients to your stove.
To get off on the right foot, we suggest these simple steps:
Cook something simple in your cast iron in the presence of fat at a high temperature, preferably in your oven. Remember, seasoning is born out of a combination of fat and high heat. Avoid things that are sticky or gunky like pot pie or mac-and-cheese.
For our Joans and Lilis, roast a chicken or vegetables. For our Heathers, Estees, and Erics, bake cornbread. For our Homer, make popcorn on your stovetop. Do so a couple times, and between each use, clean the heck out of your pan, dry it well, oil it up. From there, you should be good to go.
Don’t worry about smoke points or fancy seasoning oils or flaxseed or all that other pansplaining that the internet fools you with.
Just cook in the damn thing, and if you mess up, keep cooking.
Even a patchy new pan can still roast a mighty fine chicken.
And we’d rather have the chicken.
Wouldn’t you?
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You know we love a good fire. But we also want to talk about another cooking method that gets our gears going. Induction cooking has been around for decades, but in the last few years, it has started to mainstream, thanks in part to revered restaurants where iconic chefs are moving their commercial kitchens from the gas stoves of yesteryear toward the induction ranges of the future. This is not your uncle’s hotplate.
]]>The primal call of an open flame. Our predilection toward putting a piece of cast-iron (then a big fat steak) on top of it.
We talk about it a lot, and we stand by our statements. But now we also want to talk about another cooking method that gets our gears going—one that, like the cast-iron ovens that once took live fires out of our homes, irrevocably changing the way we live, now seeks to do just the same in our kitchens.
If you’re reading this, “induction” is likely a buzz word that you’ve been seeing a lot of lately.
Introduced at the 1933 World’s Fair, induction cooking has been around for decades, particularly in Europe and Asia, but in the last few years, it has started to go mainstream at home here in America. That’s thanks in part to a growing trend in revered restaurants, such as Alinea in Chicago, The French Laundry in Napa, and now Audrey, pictured above, from our pal Sean Brock in Nashville, where iconic chefs are moving their commercial kitchens from the gas stoves of yesteryear toward the induction ranges of the future.
In some ways, it deeply pains us—no more perfect tortillas charred over an open flame—but we also can’t really blame them.
After all, this is not your uncle’s hotplate.
More akin to the culinary iPad, these flame-free appliances have no burners, no grates, no impossible crevices to give away your late-night snacking escapades. Instead, they are glass-ceramic surfaces that—simple, sleek, easy-to-clean—look a lot like the other technology that you have in your life these days.
But how does induction work? And what makes it different than my current stove?
When powered on, a coiled copper wire located beneath the cooktop surface is charged with an alternating electrical current, which creates a magnetic field. This electromagnetic energy penetrates a compatible pan—and compatible pans only.
Luckily for us, that means any ferrous pan, aka containing iron, such as that found in many stainless steel, carbon steel, and of course, all cast-iron cookware options (even the enameled stuff).
If you aren’t sure, put a magnet on the bottom of your pot or pan and see if it sticks.
So long, copper and aluminum.
Sayonara, Calphalon.
This electromagnetic energy excites the molecules inside your cast iron, which produces heat inside the pan—not on the cooktop surface—and in turn, the water or food inside of it. The cooktop knobs adjust the heat by increasing or reducing the strength of the magnetic field.
But enough science: what difference does this make?
For starters, induction generates no ambient heat. Which means largely cool-to-the-touch cooktops (though be forewarned, your pan will still be hot). Which means no grease fires. Which means cooler kitchens in the summer months. On top of that—its biggest claim to fame—all of the energy being channeled into the pan, and the pan alone, means more energy efficiency.
Induction is being touted as the future of sustainable cooking, with the stoves transferring 90 percent of their heat directly into cookware, compared to the 75 percent of electronic cooktops, which we all know have crappy heat control, and the mere 40 percent of natural gas, which releases the rest, and its noxious fumes, into the air around your household.
That direct energy transfer also has other perks, and pitfalls—they’re powerful. Induction cooktops are said to cook your food faster, with some claims pointing to a pot of water boiling in almost half the time as other methods. They’re also more consistent, with the exact, repeatable settings allowing for precise and responsive temperature control, plus steady, even heat transfer and the enhanced ability to perfect a recipe over time.
Still, chefs have complained about the learning curves, not only in terms of acclimating to which numbered setting yields what level of heat, but also adapting the basic ways we move about our kitchens.
No more lifting a saucepan for a good whisk, or shaking a pot of popcorn, or flipping an omelet in the air. As soon as you remove the pan from the cooktop surface, the power is cut off. Which also renders round-bottom woks virtually unusable. On top of that, one has to remember that iron is a slow, steady conductor of heat, meaning that induction’s responsiveness is curbed by the cookware material, and thus not as immediate as advertised.
Not all units are created equal, either, with power quality, design, and engineering varying product to product — so do your homework. Some rival professional gas cooktops, with sophisticated sensors and a broad temperature range, while cheaper options offer limited heat control, not unlike the all-or-nothing of electric stoves, leaving them known to cause hot spots, sending you back to easy adjustability of gas in no time. There are portable tabletop and built-in units, neither of which work during power outages. You can scratch or crack them.
While it’s up to the individual user to weigh the pros and cons, we know one thing: the imminent rise of induction seems undeniable. Demand is driving down prices, with current offerings ranging between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, and all the major appliance companies—Viking, Wolf, GE, LG, Samsung, KitchenAid, Kenmore, Miele—have gotten in on the game, even making hybrids. Pair it with cast iron’s ability to readily, evenly, and consistently transfer heat, and it’s surely a tempting match.
An increasing number of Americans say they will be converting to induction with their next kitchen purchase, and in some areas, they might be forced to do so. Since 2019, 23 counties in California have enacted bans on natural gas hookups in new construction. New York is considering one statewide.
Of course, it is important to note that while induction is undoubtedly more efficient, it does still use electricity, which, compared to gas, is fueled by the less environmentally friendly coal and oil.
“Behind every electric outlet, even behind every microwave oven, there is somewhere a fire burning, probably of fossil fuel, but it’s hidden from us,” says best-selling author and investigative food journalist Michael Pollan in his Netflix miniseries Cooked, based on his book of the same name. With a flame, “It’s just right in front of us.”
In that same episode, experts share the ways in which fire made us human, with homo sapiens being the only species that cooks its food, and with the introduction of live fire to do so literally altering our evolution.
Of course, there is also the plain truth that nothing tastes better than when it’s cooked over burning wood.
The fat, the smoke, those ancient elements intermingling with something far bigger and older than all of us.
“One of the stories of progress is the disappearance of fire from our lives,” says Pollan. “But civilization really begins around that cookfire, and even now, fire does draw us together.”
We think we might just light one this weekend.
Opening image credit to Emily Dorio
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Every day, there is one pan that sits on the stove of the Butter Pat Test kitchen. It’s the second pan we ever cast, and to the eye of many other beholders, it isn’t a quintessentially pretty one.
In 2015, when this whole mess began, we didn’t have enough inventory. The good pans went to customers, and we brought home whatever was left. But with two big dents in the cooking surface, and after an accidental trip through a commercial dishwasher that left it a bit whomperjawed, Number Two is now our most prized piece of iron.
Number 1—aka the first skillet we successfully cast (after 600 failures)—sits unused on its fancy pedestal in our office. But Number 2 ain’t no show pony. Nor is number 3, or number 300. They’re all workhorses.
Number 2 has never seen a nice soft silicone spatula—the kind the Internet says you should use to protect your seasoning. A pizza wheel regularly slices temporary grooves into its surface. Tomatoes, deglazing wine, and lemon juice? All are used regularly. And most importantly, Number 2 is scoured, after every use, always with soap (gasp!), and, always, spotlessly—yes, spotlessly—clean.
Now, we know that some of you are going to take serious offense.
While most of the questions we get about seasoning are from new cooks who simply don’t want to ruin something they paid a lot of money for (we get it), there are also those who have read too many food blogs, who believe in the myth of perfect seasoning, who swear that soap is to cast iron as garlic is to vampires. They wipe out their fried fish with a paper towel and give their pan a spa treatment: a “vigorous rub of coarse Kosher salt on half of a potato.” (This is absurd, never do that.)
We’re going to let you in on a secret: “Perfect seasoning” makes your pan pretty, but it won’t turn a donkey into a Thoroughbred.
Iron is naturally porous, and the idea is that seasoning—aka the layers of polymerized oil on the pan surface—helps seal the medium, protect it from moisture, and therefore prevent rust while also creating a close to nonstick skillet.
That being said, it’s really smoothness that is the key to cast-iron cooking. Many pans these days are milled into submission, leaving microscopic crevices that require a thick salve of seasoning to smooth the surface. But for your Butter Pat, which is cast smooth, all those extra strata are just a bad paint job. They trap moisture, they can encourage mold, and simply put, they’re gross. It is true that cleaning your pan might remove some of your seasoning, but that’s okay—you want a thin, even, progressive patina, which doesn’t happen overnight.
Which brings us back to our main point: Clean your damn pan. And here’s how.
For starters, we use soap—that’s right, soap. Any kind of soap, really. (We know your great-grandmother never used the stuff on her old black pan, and that’s probably because back in those days, it was made with lye, which was caustic, not the gentler versions we use today.)
And if you must, scrub—we mean it, scrub! For our druthers, we use the Ring Rag, a stainless-steel scrubber that we designed for heavy-duty clean-ups, and now, we also have the Ring Cloth for the quick swish of daily cleaning.
After washing, heat your pan over the stove to evaporate all moisture, which causes rust. Forget paper towels and dish cloths, which just don’t cut it.
Then, after drying, lightly coat all surfaces with a refined oil, like canola, which won’t get gummy or go rancid, wiping away any excess. This protects the pan’s surface. Save the extra-virgin olive oil for your cooking.
Truly, it’s that simple, but still, sometimes, there are messes unlike other messes. You accidently leave your pan outside in the rain and it begins to rust (we’ve been there). You heat the pan too quickly on a small eye of your stovetop and burn a bullseye into the center (looking at you, Mother). You let a coq au vin braise with good brandy, then drink a little too much of said brandy, and forget the time. Sure, your seasoning might be sacrificed, but your pan probably isn’t ruined.
You cook, you make mistakes, you learn—life goes on.
In fact, we have never had to strip or re-season any of our pans, ever. And there’s not much that a good clean can’t fix, and a little more cooking won’t solve. If you follow our steps, it will last hundreds of years.
Number 2, like Number 200, is a tool for your kitchen. It’s made to navigate those culinary muddles. It’s more forgiving than we give it credit for. So stop wasting time worrying about how perfectly black your pan looks. If you must, drop us a line with your question, but don’t be surprised if we answer you with:
Move on. Keep cooking. And clean your damn pan.
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Step outside along the Chesapeake Bay this time of year and you’ll hear it before you see it. Located along the Atlantic Flyway, the air is filled with the sound of more than a million birds, migrating south and settling along these waters as they have for countless centuries, with perhaps none more popular in our neck of the woods than that of the winter waterfowl.
For their beauty and grace, of course, but also because, come December, their chatter begins to mix with what could be mistaken for distant thunder, as hordes of hunters partake in another age-old ritual: trying their luck on gunning the many ducks and Canada geese who call this place their seasonal second home.
“As a youngster, when the geese would migrate, my parents would get me and my sister out of bed at night to hear the migrating flocks,” says Chesapeake historian C. John Sullivan, whose personal artifact collection includes countless antique decoys, vintage ammunition boxes, and various taxidermy throughout his home in Bel Air, Maryland. “Waterfowling is a tradition that is still alive and well, and I think will always be here.”
As the nation’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay has long been the mecca of waterfowl hunting, with the birds once so abundant that old-time hunters said they would blanket the waters and black out the skies. This included more than a quarter-million canvasback ducks alone—half of the species’ entire population. It was these birds, in particular, that gave us this region its revered reputation (not to mention us our cast-iron connection).
At the turn of the 20th century, these especially tasty diving ducks were considered the filet mignon of wild fowl, drawing presidents (Grover Cleveland) and celebrities (Annie Oakley) to hunting clubs of the Chesapeake headwaters. Along the mouth of the Susquehanna River, the low-lying upper bay “flats” had become hallowed ground, speckled with the bird’s favored food sources such as wild celery and widgeon grasses. With the expansion of railroads and the invention of refrigeration, canvasback became a widely sought-after delicacy, shipped from Baltimore to Boston to fine-dining establishments like the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Demand gave rise to a newfound market on the Susquehanna Flats, and with it came weaponry that could harvest their catch in greater numbers, from the punt gun—the size of a small cannon, capable of striking dozens of ducks with a single shot—to the sink box—a highly effective boat in which hunters would hide camouflaged and wait for their unsuspecting targets. The latter was a gamechanger, and as the name suggests, it was sunk down to water level using flat-bottomed cast-iron decoys, sold by the pound for just several cents apiece.
“At 24 pounds apiece and only 6 or 7 cents a pound, they clearly didn’t mean that much to them,” says Sullivan. “They were created for utilitarian purposes.”
Initialed decoys with iron elements by foundry owners. Images courtesy of C. John Sullivan.
This was a time when iron foundries were commonplace, including Maryland’s premier Principio Ironworks—one of the first iron furnaces in the United States, located a stone’s throw from the Flats. Before its foray into waterfowling gear, it supplied cannons and cannon balls to American troops during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, with George Washington’s father serving as a primary investor. The owners’ initials would eventually appear on the bottom of their very own cast-iron decoys.
“At this time, decoys weren’t signed, and they were no more to the hunter than a hammer would be to a carpenter,” says Sullivan, noting that these iron decoys were likely designed by the region’s soon-to-be-famous wood carvers. “And yet the foundry owner thought enough of his decoy rigs that he put his initials on them—it declared ownership”—as well as some potential sense of pride, towing the line between function and art.
In nearby Baltimore County, the owners of the A. Weiskittel & Son Stove Foundry also added initials to their own cast-iron anchor weights, which would be tied to the bottom of floating wooden decoys. For the broader public, they created miniature versions—painted in canvasback colors, no less—as decorative salesman samples fit for ash trays or paperweights to promote their cast-iron bathtubs. (These guys loved cast iron; even their local family crypt, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is made entirely out of the material.)
Known for their cast-iron stoves and architecture such as the George Peabody Library, the Bartlett-Hayward Company in Baltimore City played an especially notable role. As avid waterfowl hunters, they, too, forged their initials into cast-iron weights, this time in the ballast-style, appearing on the underside of the decoy. But in honor of their favorite pastime, they also made two life-size, cast-iron Newfoundlands to stand guard at their downtown offices. These were replicas of the region’s first real hunting dogs, which made their American debut via the Port of Baltimore in the early 1800s, and the predecessors of the modern-day Chesapeake Bay retriever.
America’s first state dog—the Chesapeake Bay retriever.
About a century later, though, market hunting would come to an abrupt halt. The passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 eliminated the commercial trade of wild game and implemented the country’s first harvest limits in order to protect their quickly depleting populations. In turn, the sinkbox fell out of favor in local jurisdictions, and within less than two decades, it was federally banned forever.
“There’s speculation that many of those cast-iron decoys were just thrown overboard when the sinkbox was outlawed,” says Sullivan, noting that others might have been sold as scrap metal. “Some families repurposed them for lawn ornaments or doorstops.” And a few do appear in the occasional yard sale or estate auction.
At this time, the canvasback populations had already begun to decline, worsened over the decades by degrading water quality, then decimated by the loss of grasses following Hurricane Agnes in 1972. On a recreational scale, hunting shifted to other more abundant species, such as mallard ducks and Canada geese, where the smaller cast-iron decoy weights lived on until the industry’s decline left them to be replaced by the less cumbersome lead that is so common today.
Still, the imprint of those glory days—of both waterfowling and cast-iron—continues to linger on the Chesapeake. Though no longer in use, the Principio Furnace still stands, some 80 miles north of our offices, and all around it, uphill efforts are underway to improve bay water quality. Both state and federal regulations are in place to foster sustainable bird populations, with large rafts of canvasbacks even recently spotted in those wide, shallow, grass-strewn flats that have marked some of the finest waterfowl hunting in the world.
This season, we’re rooting for the birds—and of course, the occasional wild game feast.
]]>Looking out over our backyard on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there is a quiet creek where the past, present, and future of the Chesapeake Bay converge. By the first of November, most local watermen have traded their crabbing pots for a single iron oyster dredge, and their deadrise workboats will now ply the brackish waters in search of an iconic keystone species: the Crassotrea virginica, aka the Eastern oyster.
This small but mighty bivalve has been the topic of great discussion here for centuries—a vital food source for early Native American communities and later European colonists, a natural filter feeder able to clean upwards of 50 gallons of the estuary each day, an economic engine that once turned the Chesapeake into the oyster capitol of America—their populations once so plentiful they were deemed navigational hazards for ships.
“The largest genuine Maryland oyster—the veritable bivalve of the Chesapeake, still to be had at oyster roasts down the river and at street stands along the wharves—is as large as your open hand,” wrote The Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken in 1913. “A magnificent, matchless reptile! Hard to swallow? Dangerous? Perhaps to the novice, the dastard. But to the veteran of the raw bar, the man of trained and lusty esophagus, a thing of prolonged and kaleidoscopic flavors, a slow slipping saturnalia, a delirium of joy!”
Today, we cook with them often, like a recent thousand roasted over a live fire at our beloved Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. But those incredible creatures are now a shadow of what they used to be, with their historic reefs overharvested, then ravaged by deadly disease, then hammered by Hurricane Agnes, leaving the Chesapeake oyster less than one percent of its historic peak. An intimidating, if not impossible deficit, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at all the work underway just off our dock down Harris Creek.
To the north lies Harris Creek Oyster Co., one of a growing number of aquaculture operations entering the booming market of farm-to-table oysters. To the south sits the Harris Creek Sanctuary, touted as the world’s largest oyster restoration project at more than 300 acres of newly planted and protected reef. And just across the water is Wittman Wharf, one of the many former seafood packing plants that once speckled these tidal shorelines, now a bustling seafood market whose soft-shell crabs and rockfish filets grace our pans almost weekly.
In many ways, Wittman Wharf is the crossroads of the Chesapeake oyster—a critical juncture of tradition and innovation that might suggest a possible way forward for this historic seafood industry. The cinder-block building has been revived by Nick Hargrove, who grew up in this whistle-stop community and started diving for wild oysters after high school, literally donning a scuba suit and swimming to the bay bottom to harvest those craggly mollusks by hand.
Nick Hargrove, of Wild Diver Oysters, donning his equipment to hand-harvest oysters.
“This fishery is our friends, our family, our neighbors,” he says. “We’ve seen it at its lows, and then this year, the guys are catching their daily bushel limit within the first two hours. It looks like we’re going to have a good season. There are oysters everywhere.”
Not only does Hargrove work with some 20 multi-generational watermen to purchase every wild oyster they can harvest, hauling in as many as 250 bushels a day during the height of the season, but he has also reopened the packing facility, with hundreds of jars of freshly shucked oysters flying out the door this time of year, bound for fritters and stuffings. Working with the state and nonprofits, he also repurposes those discarded shells to help replant juvenile oysters on sanctuaries like the one located downstream. He even holds a few aquaculture leases.
“It’s a balance,” says Hargrove. “We all have to do our part and take care of this watershed in our own ways. Every little bit helps, really. And it feeds a lot of mouths along the way.”
Just across the peninsula from Wittman, the Orchard Point Oyster Co. entered the industry for a similar reason, with 20 acres of aquaculture leases located on either side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, with some even speckled along the Chester River’s Fryingpan Cove—which we just love—likely named for its skillet-like shape.
Fryingpan Cove: One of Orchard Point Oyster Company's oyster leases on the Eastern Shore.
A former financial analyst, founder Scott Budden returned to his hometown in 2015 after the state removed restrictions on oyster farming, giving way to a nascent industry that has the potential to abate the changes he’d begun to notice on his native tributary.
“It hit home, quite literally,” says Budden, noting that oysters not only reduce pollutants and sedimentation in the water, but also sequester carbon in their shells and create protective buffers against climate change. “My job was paying the bills but didn’t have a lot of meaning; eventually I asked myself, what was the biggest thing that l could do to personally help the bay?”
Like decades of traditional oystermen before them, Orchard Point’s work is still done by hand, with little more modern technology than a hydraulic rope winder and an outboard boat motor. But in other ways, Budden is evolving his industry, in part through the use of the increasingly popular triploid oyster.
Like seedless watermelon, these oysters, like many of those you eat in restaurants, are bred to be virtually sterile, meaning they don’t waste their energy on a summer spawn, thus eliminating the old adage of “R months.” Purchased as larvae from hatcheries and raised in the open water, they take some pressure off the wild populations while also creating a year-round market.
Scott Budden, founder of Orchard Point Oyster Company.
“What we do is different, but we’re still out there, nearly 300 days a year,” says Budden. “My family didn’t work the water, but growing up here, there’s a sense of solidarity. We want to see the industry survive, and also thrive. It’s pretty cool to think about what it could turn into.
Similar to Hargrove’s efforts, just a stone’s throw from Orchard Point’s farm, neighboring watermen recently planted some 14 million juvenile oysters back into local waters, hoping to bolster the economic and ecological sustainability of that single river. Bigger still, it might mark a sea change.
“At one time, America ate a lot of Chesapeake oysters, and who’s to say that we couldn’t get to that point again?” says Budden, who sold over 16,000 the week of Thanksgiving. “If we do our jobs, we’re going to keep putting more in the water, and that’s a win-win for everyone. It provides jobs. It supports the supply chain. It gets that dockside value up, and shows what the bay can do . . . The waters have changed, but they still produce a damn good oyster.”
We know we’ll be having our fill of them—raw, roasted, cast-iron fried, and pied—this week.
We’re eternally thankful for the ones that hit our plates, and pans.
]]>We know he’s not exactly a household name, but we owe a lot to Benjamin Thompson. Sir Benjamin Thompson, to be exact, though known by most as Count Rumford is the man to thank for most of our modern meals, our 21st century kitchens, and—without a doubt—our cast iron. (He was also a bit of a turncoat, but that’s another story.)
]]>We owe a lot to Benjamin Thompson.
We know, he’s not exactly a household name. But Sir Benjamin Thompson, to be accurate, is the man to thank for most of our modern meals, our 21st century kitchens, and—without a doubt—our cast iron.
A man “entitled to the esteem and gratitude of mankind, for devoting his talents with unwearied assiduity to objects of public usefulness” where “in England, in France, in Germany, in all parts of the continent, the people are enjoying the blessings of his discoveries; and from the humble dwellings of the poor even to the palaces of sovereigns all will remember that his sole aim was to be always useful to his fellow men.”
It’s no surprise then that this unconventional inventor turned autodidact physicist was also a count—Count Rumford, as he was most famously known during his heyday at the end of the 18th century. But long before his regal titles—also Knight of the Orders of the White Eagle and St. Stanislaus, Privy Counsellor of State to the duke of Bavaria, and Count of the Holy Roman Empire—Rumford was just a precocious New England lad, born to little means in small-town Massachusetts, with an early affinity for science, mathematics, and fireworks.
(Footnote: He would also become a bit of a turncoat, serving as a British spy during the Revolutionary War, charged as a Tory, then exiled to London, leaving his wife and daughter behind in Rumford, New Hampshire, now Concord—hence the nickname.)
Traitor or not, we still find ourselves indebted to his pyromania, which would problem-solve the panorama of everyday life and, most notably, forever change the field of thermodynamics through his groundbreaking study of heat.
“To engage in experiments on heat was always one of my most agreeable employments [since the age of 17],” he wrote in one of his many essays. “Whenever I could snatch a moment, I returned to it anew, and always with increased interest.”
Luckily for us, Rumford used this impulse, with the aid of firearms and cannons, to debunk the commonly held theory that heat was a liquid form of matter, discovering that it was in fact a form of motion, eventually leading to one of the earliest measurements of heat and mechanical energy, as well as countless observations on heat’s transfer across various materials, via conduction, convection, and radiation.
Best of all, he would actually apply his findings, with his inventions ranging from improved chimneys and fireplaces—to give off more heat, burn less wood, and limit smoke, thanks in part to cast iron, no less—to a slew of culinary creations: the double boiler, the percolating coffeepot, the preamble for sous vide, and especially, for our purposes, the kitchen range.
Before Rumford’s time, the Western world largely cooked their food inside of an open hearth. It was a hot, messy, even dangerous affair, with heavy cauldrons hung over a live fire or placed directly on the blazing coals. Enclosed ranges had been attempted before, dating back to Ancient China, Egypt, and Rome, but it wasn’t until Rumford’s cast-iron version, circa the 1790s, that we could use our cooking heat to its full potential.
Always first in line for innovation, this 18th-century Shaker kitchen incorporates Rumford’s principles of captured heat.
Centered around a single fire source, this massive brick range featured a flat top with a series of different-size burners and separate iron-clad interior chambers, including a roasting oven, with heat levels able to be controlled individually. Like his fireplaces, it was more heat retentive, fuel efficient, and safe than an open hearth, and society never looked back.
In fact, his inventions became so popular on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that the Rumford fireplace would appear in both Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Thomas Jefferson would install multiple Rumford fireplaces and a Rumford range at Monticello. And he was eventually deemed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt one of the five most interesting men to have ever lived.
Luckily for him, Rumford’s range coincided with the rise of American iron mining at the end of the Industrial Revolution. By the beginning of the 19th century, a booming manufacturing industry was underway, making a medley of products for heating and cooking. Cast iron stoves became a staple—and centerpiece—of American kitchens, gilded with porcelain and nickel and cast into elaborately decorated designs.
Of all the metals, cast iron was the most “durable, and better on many accounts,” wrote Rumford, as well as affordable, with his cast-iron fireplace grates costing “only seven shillings and sixpence sterling” in his day. Such parts, he noted, “should never be made of any other material.”
Enter cast-iron cookware, with Rumford even designing his own set to fit his kitchen systems, and now-iconic cookware companies hopping on the bandwagon. Like Griswold Manufacturing, which started as a stove accessories company before moving into cookware in the 1870s. Or Wagner Manufacturing, which, a decade later, was founded with the help of a former stove company employee. Others, like Atlanta and Favorite, began as stove companies themselves.
Those numbers on the bottom of vintage skillets? They directly corresponded to the various-sized “stove eyes,” or burners invented atop the Rumford range. But that’s another story.
Through his research, Rumford knew cast iron, and the man had many opinions on the matter, most of which we can’t help but agree on.
From cleaning it: “If, instead of . . . keeping them bright, which notable housewives are apt to do, in order that their kitchen furniture may appear neat and clean, they be simply washed and rinsed out with warm water, and wiped with a soft dishcloth.”
To crafting its seasoning: “The process by which this covering is gradually formed is similar to that by which some gunsmiths brown the barrels of fowling-pieces…to defend it from a contact with those substances which are capable of dissolving and corroding it, or, in other words, to prevent the further progress of rust.”
Sure, he was no patriot, but it is with good reason that there is a Rumford Chair of Physics professorship at Harvard College, and a Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London, and a Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his contributions to American cuisine—with some food historians crediting his range, which was quickly adopted by French chefs, to revolutionizing restaurant fare—we gladly forgive his sins.
Rumford died on the outskirts of Paris in 1814 at the age of 61, and today, the few Yanks who know his name might only by accident, via the baking powder cans that still bear it on grocery store shelves. Until now, many others likely never noticed that the label features a silhouette of a bewigged gentleman, depicted and denominated in honor of one New England expat’s historic scientific endeavors.
In a 1908 cookbook, the powder’s parent company, Rumford Chemical Works, declared him “the grand master of the great guild of chefs, the first and greatest scientist of the kitchen.”
To that we say: Here, here.
]]>We admit it: we’re tired of winter, but even by the end of March, we could always use one more fire. For the cooking, of course, but also sometimes just for the friends we gather around them, especially after this last year.
A Cowboy Cauldron that lives by the smokehouse on our founder’s family farm in Sandridge South Carolina.
Most of you have probably seen our many references to the Cowboy Cauldron Company. Some of you have even noticed that our Lili skillet has its logo on the bottom. Well, we thought it was about time that we offered an explanation, as usual, in the form of a story.
Back in the late '90s, Mike Bertelsen, the owner of the Cowboy Cauldron Company, lived in Alexandria, Virginia, where I designed and renovated historic homes. Mike and I were both firebugs and Huck Finns, always out on the marshes of the Potomac River together, messing around with bows and arrows, canoes, and campfires.
The Cowboy Cauldron was born during those days in Virginia, and it was around the first cauldron that a thousand questions were asked, and often left unanswered, about cooking with cast iron over an open flame.
Before we began Butter Pat in 2013, we sourced, reconditioned, and sold thousands of vintage pieces of cast-iron cookware together - our warehouse is still full of the stuff - to chefs, home cooks, and live-fire enthusiasts, especially those with Cowboy Cauldrons.
In fact, the first place you could buy a Butter Pat Lili skillet, the very first Butter Pat skillet, was from the Cowboy Cauldron Company. Hence the tribute, still molded on the back of every 14-inch pan.
Eventually, Mike moved home to Salt Lake City, and Butter Pat set up shop across the Chesapeake on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Our conversations these days are more about supply-chain problems than how to build a teepee campfire, but whenever we get together, there is always a fire and a cast-iron pan.
We think Mark Twain would still approve.
Cowboy Cauldron has a new 24” portable cauldron, The DUDE. Yup, fits in the trunk of a car. Check it out at cowboycauldron.com, or wait around for the exclusive offer to Butter Pat customers.
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It almost seems like common knowledge: Cast iron is a thing of the South, as much a part of the region’s sense of place as the fried chicken or corn bread it cooks. Maybe it’s a cliché, but when we think of the pan’s past, we conjure up images of old Appalachian homesteads with fat black skillets pulling biscuits out of the oven or boiling a heap of collards on a rusted-out stove.
But the thing is, cast iron is not a Southern invention. To be technical, the medium tracks back to sixth-century China. But for our purposes, on this continent, it was born in the North, where the colonies’ first foundry, Saugus Iron Works, was founded in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1640s, where our first cast-iron pot was poured.
Photo: The Saugus Pot
Before long, other ironworks would speckle the rest of New England and dot the Atlantic Coast, with even our own Maryland being a one-time vital hub—the Old Line State’s Southern status is still up for debate—before seeping out in western and southern directions. As one would imagine, manufacturers of cast-iron cookware weren’t far from the nexus of foundries, if not actually a part of them. Most of these companies began production in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the advent of the modern kitchen pulled our cooking surfaces out of the hearth and onto early cast-iron stovetops, often accompanied by matching pots or pans of the same medium and brand.
In 1865, what would become Griswold Manufacturing was founded in Erie, Pennsylvania, casting stoves and hardware before venturing into cooking vessels, a market it would lead for nearly a century. It was later sold to Wagner Manufacturing in the 1950s, another popular pan company founded in Sidney, Ohio, in 1891, a few years after the Buckeye State’s other great Favorite Stove & Range Company, circa 1887.
Photo: Favorite Stove and Range Company - Piqua, Ohio
The South’s first cast-iron company was not the beloved Lodge Manufacturing we think of today, whose initial foundry was established in 1896 in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, which was fittingly named after the Pennsylvania city in hopes of becoming a great ironworks epicenter, too. Instead, that pioneering accolade goes to the Atlanta Stove Works of Georgia, founded in 1889, which later opened the Birmingham Stove & Range foundry in Alabama for the production of its popular cookware. They lasted until 1989, longer than much of the other national competition, with most manufacturers closing throughout the 20th century. Still thriving today, Lodge does remain the last true relic of cast iron’s heyday, though new companies are now popping up from New York to Los Angeles. And, of course, Butter Pat is here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
So why, despite cast iron’s roving roots, the deep Southern connection? It could be said it was born out of urbanization, during and following the Industrial Revolution. Masses of migrants moved to metropolitan areas in search of work, furthering dichotomizing city and country, and in many ways North and South, with southern cities slower to grow than their northern neighbors. “Many of the places that we think of now as urban environments in the South, like Atlanta or Houston, didn’t develop into the densities they reflect today until the 20th century,” says Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum. Atlanta’s population in 1850, for instance, was less than 10,000, compared to Baltimore’s then-nearly-170,000 or Philadelphia’s 500,000-plus.
During these years, cast-iron cookware was ubiquitous, but as residents of urban areas gained access to larger, modernized markets, shiny new products became more readily available, including lighter cookware options such as aluminum and stainless steel, inspiring many to ditch their heavy cast-iron skillets. (Those fifth-floor walk-ups didn’t help either.) Urban residents also had more access to trades, such as tinkers, who could repair their new, more malleable cookware, says Williams, “and as lighter cookware became less and less expensive, it just became easier to throw away.”
In rural, more impoverished pockets, however, people held onto their old equipment, likely for economic reasons. At the time, cast iron was relatively cheap, with a 1930s Griswold pan starting around $15 in today’s money, and these sturdy, one-pot vessels offered a lot of versatility, being used for a variety of recipes and over a range of heat sources, both indoors and out. “They were affordable and accessible and they probably found their way into southern kitchens out of necessity,” says Sean Brock, the James Beard Award-winning chef who founded the likes of McGrady’s and Husk in Charleston.
In many ways, cast iron became a valuable asset to Southern dishes, and its strengths, such as heat retention, became used to a recipe’s advantage. “Like cornbread,” says Williams, “because you could only get that crispy outside crust with cast iron.”
“Likewise, real Southern fried chicken,” says Appalachian food expert Ronni Lundy, “[which] requires a single skillet that can reach high heat to initially crisp [the skin], and then be turned low, but maintain a steady temperature.”
Perhaps it’s that simple: Southern folk held onto their cast iron longer, out of need over nostalgia, and in turn, they used it to perfect some of the most iconic dishes in America. “When you are known for a few things, like cornbread and fried chicken, and the best versions of those are made in cast iron, then you almost assume the pan’s a Southern thing,” says Brock.
Of course, maybe also, it could have something to do with another Southern thing: storytelling. Because as the great raconteurs have taught us, sometimes pure fact isn’t as fun without a little touch of fiction. Northern by design, but Southern by soul.
“Southern food is the most story-driven, folklore-driven, tradition-driven of any American cuisine,” says North Carolina food writer Sheri Castle. “I don’t know another kind of cookware that has such strong recipe associations, or that people have passed down as heirlooms. I don’t know anyone who tells such tales about Teflon, and none of us have our grandmother’s Revere Ware. But we do have those cast-iron skillets.”
After all, the past is the past, no matter if it’s 5, 50, or 100 years. And there’s a sense of pride in carrying that on, in having a pot or pan that’s been passed down through generations, much like the cast-iron pan that started it all for us, which belonged to our South Carolina grandmother, Estee. “Maybe the energy of remembered great cooks is still somehow in the metal,” says Lundy.
We like to think that, too.
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Okay, so we’ll tell you up front, this issue of the Standard Edition is going to be the Sean Brock Special. In part, because we love the guy, for his food, for his restaurants, and perhaps most importantly of all, for his big brain.
All photos courtesy of Peter Frank Edwards
Brock has been called many things—visionary chef, farm-to-table hero, Southern culinary revivalist, agricultural anthropologist—and we’ll add one more, which anyone who has eaten at his renowned McCrady’s in Charleston already knows: mad scientist.
For more than a decade, the James Beard Award-winning Chef’s Table star has been combining downhome fare with a forward-thinking philosophy, looking to the past to inform the future. “We are so young as a country,” says Brock. “There are so many traditions ahead of us that we haven’t even dreamt up yet.”
In the same way he’s dug into the roots of beloved Southern recipes, he has delved into the science of his kitchens with unbridled curiosity. And in few places has this been applied more than his cookware, and particularly cast iron, harkening back to his influential grandmother, whose home was littered with pots, pans, and farm equipment made out of the medium.
“When I was about 12, she bought me my first cast-iron wok and taught me how to take care of it,” says Brock. “It’s tricky if you’ve never cooked with it before. Now that I understand it from a scientific standpoint, I cook just about everything in cast iron.”
He likens it to a fast car, but vows that the more you use it, the more versatile it becomes. “Of course, the quality of the pan has a lot to do with it,” says Brock.
Butter Pat: Tell us more about this fast car analogy, which we love.
Sean Brock: Just like a fast car, it can get away from you. It’s not as responsive as other pans—it’s slow to heat up, and if it gets too hot, it’s hard to cool down, which I think scares a lot of people. And it can be super dangerous when it gets out of hand. [Laughs.] But you need to be aware of that fact, and if you can respect it, you’ll ultimately have more control and better performance. You have to be patient. And the more you use it, the more you realize how versatile it is.
What are some of the qualities that make cast iron so versatile?
How it holds heat, once you get it to where you want it to be, for starters. It can stay at that temperature and evenly for a long, long time, which is good for cooking. That slow responsiveness can be used to its greatest advantage.
That said, a lot of people think cast iron is a good conductor of heat, but it’s actually the opposite, meaning that the pan does not easily give away its heat, especially compared to other mediums such as copper and aluminum.
Yes, and that’s definitely a myth that needs to be busted. I think a lot of people have that misunderstanding, myself included in the early days, based off the fact that cast iron can get really hot. That doesn’t mean it’s a good conductor of heat, that just means it can get really hot. And anything can get really hot with a fire underneath it. But a pan also isn’t judged based on its heat conductivity. It’s judged on how well it performs, and that performance is based off multiple properties.
For cast iron, that’s low conductivity, slow responsiveness, plus high reactivity, as well as density and thickness—how all of these things interact and impact each other.
If you put all those factors down on a piece of paper and made a chart, you’d find that cast iron is actually the most balanced medium, much more so than any other cooking surface, and therefore, it’s the easiest to use, and the most useful, once you understand it.
What are some chef workarounds for some of cast iron’s thermal properties?
In terms of being slow to heat up and slow to cool down, it’s patience and time. It’s like building a fire. And the key is getting to know your pan in the oven and on top of the stove. They’re different kinds of heat—you can obviously turn a flame on your stove up and down much faster than you can an oven—and the pan is going to react differently. Practice both and take notes. But you can also use the two in tandem. I keep my oven loaded with cast iron, all the time so they’re hot and ready to go. At the restaurant, we keep stacks near the fire so they’re the exact temperature we need them to be. Because of how they retain heat, they’ll sit there forever, perfectly happy and ready to use.
So you utilize your heat sources to mediate some of those thermal properties, which you discuss further in our Good Reasons piece on cornbread.
With cast iron, you have to think ahead about every step of the cooking process. Where the pan is going and what the movement of the pan is going to be. Moving from the oven to the stovetop is a variable that can throw off an entire recipe if you’re not paying attention. In some recipes, like cornbread, the pan goes in the oven first, then it goes on the stove with a burner on beneath it, because you’re about to be adding ice-cold batter and you don’t want the temperature to drop. This way, you’re creating an insurance plan in terms of maintaining temperature. And you can’t do that with any other pan, because they’re so quick to heat up and cool down. It just gets all over the place.
On the other hand, iron is highly reactive, meaning it is more likely to chemically interact with other substances, like food or water, which is why cast iron is prone to rusting if left wet and can sometimes affect the color or flavor of a dish. Is this where seasoning comes in?
Seasoning basically acts as a barrier, a skin, an added layer of protection that slows down any potential reactions. If you season cast iron properly, you heat the oil so that it oxidizes and then polymerizes, filling the pores of the iron and make it less penetrable. Water inhibits a lot of things and slows everything down, so your goal is to get rid of it as fast as possible, especially when you’re trying to get crust or sear on breads or proteins or even vegetables. If there’s too much moisture, if you have too much steam, you don’t get the same textures, and you’re also diluting flavor instead of concentrating it. The beauty of a polymerized seasoning on a pan is that the built-up oil actually repels water and helps evaporate it as fast as possible.
How does the pan’s density come into play?
The density, and the thickness of the pan, is just as important as seasoning. It’s actually way, way more important than most people realize. This comes into play in how the pan actually transfers heat into the food. The density of the iron keeps the heat at a constant, with a density of thermal energy being transferred into the food. It’s like a slow, even flow that the low density of aluminum wouldn’t allow to happen. The thickness also makes it more reliable, because you know there aren’t going to be some spots that are hot while others are warm or cold. For me, that’s one of the most important advantages of Butter Pat pans. The thick bottom creates the most even caramelization of a crust that is humanly possible.
We’ve cast our pans to have thinner sides but a thicker bottom heat plate to better conduct and distribute heat. How does this compare to other cast-iron pans, like the beloved vintage ones we are passed down or pick up at antique stores?
The pans that we romanticize from the 19th and early 20th centuries were thin all the way around, which can cause hot spots, which is not good for cooking. But the Butter Pats are thick where they need to be, a detail that was closely paid attention to that often gets overlooked. How do you improve upon something that was already pretty amazing? Well, it’s those tiny little obsessive details that aren’t obvious to the eye that improve the whole thing slightly, in the same way that I try to approach food. We have these beautiful, wonderful, romantic traditions. But everything can always be better.
Even the physics.
You say “modern technology” and it freaks people out. But it’s this modern knowledge, and modern wisdom, that allows us to make small improvements on the past. Just like in cooking, and cooking Southern food, it’s enhancing tradition by moving it forward, and moving it forward by enhancing it.
Our thanks to Sean Brock for his time over the past two months as we put together this interview.
]]>We know we might be a little biased, but we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, especially coming out of the historic month of July that holds our great nation’s Independence Day: the cast-iron skillet should be on the American flag.
That’s right—a cast iron. And that’s because the age-old medium played a vital role in the very creation of this nation.
A pot cast at the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts and carbon dated to about 1647; the oldest iron casting in the New World. A shareholder in the foundry wrote March 15 of that year “we have cast some tuns of pots, likewise mortars, stoves, skillets”.
By the late 17th century, the colonies were riddled with iron foundries, particularly in Maryland and Pennsylvania, where we are headquartered and make our pans, respectively, today. But back then, inside these rustic structures, iron ore was melted down into a form that could later be turned into finished goods, be it by cast or wrought methods, giving birth to the dawn of American manufacturing. Pots, pans, skillets, as well as hardware, tools, and implements, up to shot, cannon, and ship ballasts were all made using American iron, with techniques evolving as colonists became better acquainted with the natural resources of the New World.
By the late 1700s, America had become the main supplier of iron to Great Britain, and bigger yet, the third largest producer in the world, which naturally started to make the monarchy nervous. With commercial trade growing stiffly competitive with other countries, like the Dutch, British Parliament decided to instate a series of acts that would limit colonial independence and growth—perhaps the most important and impactful being the Iron Act of 1750.
Thos. Jefferson in describing cast iron from one of Virginia’s many ironworks operating in the late 1700s “The toughness of the cast iron of Ross's and Zane's furnaces is very remarkable. Pots and other utensils, cast thinner than usual, of this iron, may be safely thrown into, or out of the wagons in which they are transported.”
This policy restricted the construction of new furnaces and forges, as well as the manufacture of finished goods, ultimately keeping the colonies dependent upon their motherland. Suddenly, colonial iron could only be exported to England, where it would be turned into an array of products and then sent back across the Atlantic and sold around the world.
Of course, in true patriotic fashion, the colonists decided to ignore these restrictions, which some say ignited the first spark of resentment toward the British Empire that would lead to the American Revolution.
“The iron we dig from our mountains, we have just the liberty to make into bars, but farther we must not go,” complained one Philadelphia merchant in a letter to Benjamin Franklin in 1765, nearly a decade before he would lead the first Continental Congress. “We must neither slit it nor plate it, nor must we convert it to steel, though ’tis a truth well known, that we cannot have steel from England fit for use. Nay, though England admits of steel being imported from Germany, she will not suffer it to be made in her Colonies.”
Nassawango Iron Furnace erected by the Maryland Iron Company. One of the first blast furnaces in the US near Snow Hill on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Recognized as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. Photo courtesy of furnacetown.org
On July 4, 1776, more than 10 percent of the signatures on the Declaration of Independence came from metal casters, and throughout the Revolutionary War, those same colonial foundries would go on to supply cannons and ammunition to the Continental Army. Later, too, cast-iron artillery would be used to protect Fort McHenry from British invasion in the War of 1812—a battle that would Francis Scott Key to pen our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It would appear in the Mexican and Civil Wars, as well, and, eventually, in the Industrial Age of the mid to late 1800s, it would play a pivotal part in the establishment of U.S. railroads and westward expansion.
Many foundries thrived in latter half of the 19th century—a time when some of those same workers would also transition into America’s next great metal industry, steel, and the Industrial Revolution—and a few even lived on well into the 20th century. Though a relative youngster, our own foundry dates back to the 1950s.
Looking back, looking ahead, we like to think they carry the torch.
Or better yet, the flag.
]]>When the calendar flips and the mercury climbs, the brief season of spring brings forward a thousand fleeting treasures of the Chesapeake Bay. It is a time of emergence, then abundance, and before we know it, the ephemeral.
Blink, and you miss it. Warm days, a cool breeze. The arrival of the osprey, blooms on the dogwood tree, that first flush of wildflowers and the rippling whiff of honeysuckle, all before we’re overwhelmed by the plentitude and potency of summer. And by the eve of June, when winter already feels like another lifetime, this fruitful feeling reaches its greatest zenith on the Chesapeake with the flight of the soft-shell crab.
From May through September (if we’re lucky), the blue crab—callinectes sapidus, or “beautiful, savory swimmer”—emerges from its wintry slumber and make its way along the bottom of this brackish bay. Before they can become those whales we covet come October, crabs must shed their hard, outer shells in order to grow, and in their molt, a new, delicate inner shell is revealed.
The entire process takes just a few hours, with the new exoskeleton fully hardening within a matter of days. But in this moment, the iconic crustaceans have transformed into the colloquial “soft crab,” “soft-shell,” “paper,” “buster,” or, at the exact right time, according to certain watermen, “velvet,” all one in the same—a coveted seafood delicacy sought out for centuries along the Atlantic Ocean and its inland waterways. To eat them as hard shells is hard work, with many a pricked finger picking its way through those intricate innards for that prized lump of luscious meat. Meanwhile, these plump, flavorful, yet fragile beauties indulged our most primal instincts and are devoured eaten whole.
That ancient molt typically takes place in grassy shallows and sandbars, but over the last hundred-plus years, watermen have also taken to shedding the crabs on land—a long-held (and still difficult) form of aquaculture in which they must intently watch the colors of the “peelers” to know precisely when they’ll shift their shape. As soon as the shells drop, the crabs are pulled from tank’s waters, forever preserved in that pliable state.
As one might expect, the appetite for these aquatic delights dates back to the estuary’s earliest settlers, with accounts by 17th century Europeans documenting the hard crab feasts and soft-shell harvests of Native Americans. James Michener speaks to such culinary customs in Chesapeake—a masterpiece tome of fiction, though based on heavy reporting and research—when his Susquehannock protagonist Pentaquod discovers the soft-shell’s edibility after watching Great Blue Herons toss them down their gullets. Later, he eats them for the first time roasted in bear fat over a live fire.
“Do I eat legs and all?” he asks Nativan, a woman of the Choptank tribe whom he would eventually marry, before inhaling four. “Now you are one of us,” she beams with pride.
In the decades that followed, the soft-shell crab would only grow in popularity, with the first soft-shell nursery built in South Carolina in 1885 by an African-American named Charles Leslie. The practice would eventually take over the entire East Coast, from New Orleans to New York City, and by the early 1900s, cookbooks carried recipes for them boiled, fried, broiled, steamed, and even curried, with one Cajun iteration declaring, “The soft-shell crab is greatly affected by epicures, and is a dainty dish that graces the most aristocratic tables.”
Somewhere along the way, Maryland’s Smith Island—the remote archipelago just west of the southern Eastern Shore and perhaps most famous for its namesake nine-layer chocolate cake—became the soft crab capital of the world, and today, watermen still troll this disappearing spit of land, wading knee-deep and net-in-hand into the shoreline grasses, the docks lined with manmade beds urging the plucked peelers to release their shells.
Only a handful of Smith Island eateries still hawk them the way they should be eaten, especially in an era of fancy appropriations such as soft-crab-studded sushi, eggs Benedicts, and bánh mìs. We’d eat those versions, too, of course, but they’ll never compare to the fried platters and white-bread sandwiches served with ripple-cut potato chips at the waterfront Bayside Inn in Smith Island. Or the fat po’boys, somehow unsacrilegously stuffed with just the meaty bodies, slung at the nearby Drum Point Market. Or any other crab shack, church cookout, or Sunday kitchen along the Chesapeake. Just simple, savory sustenance. Ambrosia by the sea.
“A crab provides little food, so he is not easy to eat. But the little he does offer is the best food under the sky,” Navitan told Pentaquod in Chesapeake. “To eat crab, you must work, which makes you appreciate him more. He is the blessing, the remembrance. And no man or woman ever ate enough.” Like the softness of spring, and even the glow of early summer, life is too short; never, ever just eat one.
For cooking them on your own, there is no right or wrong way to go about it—sautéed, grilled, or fried—but there are a few tips to save you time and trouble. Whatever you’ve been taught, know that size doesn’t matter. Just always buy them live, preferably cleaned (trust us: the process is easy, but not pretty), and keep them on ice until it’s time.
When you’re ready, pull out your cast-iron pan, place it on the stove on medium-high heat or over a live fire. Throw in a half-dozen pads of butter while you lightly dredge the crabs in flour mixed with J. O. Spice—the seasoning typically used at local seafood houses over the better-known Old Bay. Fill the pan with their flimsy bodies, fry until golden brown, add more butter, flip, repeat.
Serve them as the locals do: stacked on white bread with a thick smear of mayonnaise, ice-cold lettuce, and the equally ephemeral summer tomato. Or simply eat them on their own.
Just know that we won’t judge if you have a slice of Smith Island cake, too.
]]>There’s a bit of an unofficial motto around here at the Butter Pat offices. Three simple words that sum up who we are as people, and as a company, and the kind we like to keep. It might say more about our ethos than any marketing team could make up. And we have a feeling, if you’re cooking on cast iron, you might abide by the maxim, too.
Now, let us start by saying, if you’re into cats, that’s okay, too, but boy, do we love our dogs. By now, especially if you follow us on the internet, you’ve likely seen our three-year-old American water spaniel, beloved bird dog, and unofficial mascot of Butter Pat Industries—Trix. She goes with us everywhere, from the foundry to the food festivals. She sleeps at our feet in the shop (and she’s taken over the bed at home). She gets the pan drippings for dinner if she’s been especially good. And sometimes just because.
Of course, as with most relationships, it hasn’t always been simple. Strong willed and hard headed, as is typical of her breed, she’s frustrated the hell out of us over the years, and we know for a fact we’ve pissed her off, too. Three years and thousands of training hours in, she’s still a work in progress, much like us.
And for everything we’ve taught her, she—observant, intuitive, clever—has gifted us a few of her own invaluable lessons, too. Like diligence, humility, and maybe most of all, patience. That special bond between dog and owner doesn’t just happen the moment they come home. It’s an ever-evolving process of getting to know each other. One that takes time—often years. You have to find out who the dog is. What they like, what they don’t. How they think and feel, which is a lot. How far to push them, and how far they can push you.
All of these nuances matter. After all, it’s a dog’s individuality, and their endless idiosyncrasies, that gives them their humanity, and that makes us choose them as our life partners. We see ourselves in their imperfection, in their striving to be better. Our job is to embrace all of it, and not give up.
Being who we are, we also can’t help but find parallels here between our pups and our cast irons. Like with dogs, you have to learn your pan’s limits. Its heat, its speed, its thin spots, its thicknesses, its warps and all—as well as your own. You have to try and fail and find small successes, like fried eggs, before the big ones, like buttery filets of fish. Because, like we touched on in our last story, where’s the fun in instant reward anyways? We welcome a little resistance, or in Trix’s case, rebellion.
These lines converge in our friend and famed chef David Guas of Bayou Bakery in Arlington, Virginia. Before he lived within the beltway, this multi-generation Louisianan was born in Cajun country—coming up on a cuisine that usually begins with a seemingly simple recipe of flour, fat, and heat. Used to start such nominal dishes as gumbo, béchamel, and étouffée, “roux is a staple of Louisiana cooking,” says David. It also just so happens to be one of the most common dog names in the state, alongside the likes of Boudin and Beignet.
Under the tutelage of his larger-than-life Aunt Boo, David first learned to cook the stuff when he was 14 years old. “At that age, being told you have to sit there and stir something for an hour, you’re like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’,” he says with a laugh. Eventually Boo bought him his first cast iron and he slowly perfected his own roux recipe until it looked the way she taught him—like the color of the Bayou after heavy rain.
But slowly is the key word. There was a lot of trial and error, with lessons still learned today. “I always tell people to buy a five-pound bag of flour and a gallon of oil because it might take you a few tries,” he says. “You can’t even do the laundry. You have to commit fully.
And David has. His gumbo is now hunted down by hungry foodies and heralded by the likes of The Local Palate. Just last week, he toted 15 gallons of the good stuff, made with duck fat roux and smoked duck sausage, to the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Roux is the vanity plate on his Harley. And the name of his four-year-old yellow Lab.
“It’s about commitment and consistency—that’s what we strive for at the restaurant every day—and dog training is the same.”
“It’s about knowing your animal and its personality. It’s about not sending mixed messages. And commands coming from one individual who they share a special bond with. And like with the roux, you can’t get emotional or too far ahead of yourself. If you increase the heat because you want to speed things up, you’ll burn it. It’s about putting in the time. You can’t expect certain results if you don’t.”
Training his Roux, like training our Trix, hasn’t always been, well, duck soup. She, too, was destined for a waterfowl blind on the Chesapeake Bay—a landscape and way of life that in many ways parallels the Louisiana marsh where he and his Aunt Boo were raised. From the get-go, she loved the water, ready to work as soon as her vest came out and her collar went on. But four years in, she’s still far from perfect, even stumping a few of the fanciest trainers. Some days, defiance takes over. Other times, she’s a star.
“She’s taught me patience, that’s for sure,” says David. “Just like the roux.”
It took us a while to appreciate this, but there will probably never be a hunt when Trix flawlessly executes every retrieve. When she suddenly stops proudly gallivanting around the field after a good one instead of pointedly bringing back the bird to hand. When she decides to hang on our every command and hand signal from there on out. When she’s a perfect dog.
And that’s okay. We’re both far from perfect, and she’s taught us that.
After all, as a dog owner, all we can really hope for is that one day, if we’re lucky, we will come to an understanding. That neither of us is the boss. That we are extensions of each other. That we both have a lot to teach and learn. Just give it time.
But okay, okay, that being said, even patience does have its limits. And one thing we still can’t figure out for the life of us South Carolinians turned Marylanders is why you’d cook something so goddamn sensitive as roux in the mercurial medium of a cast iron.
It’s got to be more than virtue. It might just be pure insanity.
“The idea is slower and lower,” says David. “Cast iron holds heat and keeps it consistent.”
But really, he says, “I’ve just never been shown any other way.”
Sometimes, that’s good enough.
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It all started with a broken pan. Here we were, along the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, and there it sat, on the ground before us. “A black pan,” as our grandmother, Estee, used to nonchalantly call it—a 10-inch, unmarked hunk of cast iron that held little if any value, except of course, that it was hers—nearly split in two.
]]>It all started with a broken pan.
Here we were, along the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, and there it sat, on the ground before us. “A black pan,” as our grandmother, Estee, used to nonchalantly call it—a 10-inch, unmarked hunk of cast iron that held little if any value. (Except, of course, that it was hers.) We watched it fall down the steps into the Maryland mud, and out of thin air, it now carried a long thin line across its surface, nearly splitting it in two.
Estee was the matriarch of our family, the sort of omniscient being that most Southern grandmothers become, instilling in us her strong will, work ethic, and lack of suffering for any fools.
But almighty as she may have been, her pan was not passed down with any fanfare.
It would come into our hands and remain there, much as she saw it—a nothin’-special, no-frills kitchen tool to be used day in and day out. It was the pan that stayed on the stove, the one we cooked in, that we packed up in boxes and took with us from place to place. It was like our right hand, sure, but was it meaningful?
Well, it certainly was once it lay cracked on the ground at our feet.
In one fumbling second, we broke not just the pan, but also the possibility of passing this family connection further in time. That cast-iron had been in Estee’s hands. It was in ours. And it could have been in our children’s one day, too. But it was only in that moment that we understood its true value. Right before our eyes, this otherwise ordinary object was transformed into a priceless heirloom.
In Japan, there is an ancient philosophy that speaks to this new way of seeing. Centuries ago, Buddhist masters started to replace the popular, imported drinking bowls of the country’s sacred tea ceremonies with that of common pottery. These rustic ceramic vessels, first used by farmers, had no striking colors or sleek designs. They were handmade and imprecise, which the masters encouraged ceremony participants to study, slowly spinning them in their fingers and admiring their imperfections.
In doing so, they challenged the rules of beauty that came before them, and in passing the bowls down from master to master, they created a sort of pedigree, elevating their status to that of state treasure.
In the end, wabi sabi is an embrace of the ordinary, the imperfect, the impermanent, and a celebration of the understated beauty that comes with age and time. Be it a piece of pottery or a cast-iron pan, flaws and fleetingness only make an object more profound. The patina of use becomes an essential part of its history.
This is a hard concept to swallow in Western culture, where we prioritize perfection and preservation. But once something is perfect, where do we go from there? What comes next? What becomes our purpose?
Even now, that old broken cast-iron, much as the new ones we make today, are nothing special. They’re tools, each of which is cast by the human hand, however meticulously, with the rouge fingerprint from our foundrymen sometimes finding their way into the iron surfaces, and the letters on each handle hail from our own quick scrawl. We welcome both as artifacts—testaments to the fact that we were here.
But just because something is utilitarian doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful, or instilled with value. “Pare down to the essence,” wrote Leonard Koren, a wabi sabi expert, “but don't remove the poetry.” We use these pans every day. We hold them in our hands. We let them nourish us and our families. The hope is that, years from now, someone will pick one up, appreciate its curves and craftsmanship, and use it in their own sort of ritual. Then pass it on to someone else, too.
Maybe there was some fate in the handle slipping out of our hands that morning. Maybe instead of breaking off a possibility, that “black pan” and its broken metal would set in motion all the rest. A jagged crack that represents different paths taken. A scar that marks not the end, but rather a beginning—or one of many.
Estee’s cast-iron still sits on a shelf in our office with that thin line lingering toward the center. We like to see it as a humble reminder of all the work that’s left to be done.
]]>Here at Butter Pat, we love a good story. The kind that stick in our craw, that lean us back in our chairs, or leave us slapping our knees. That we listen to intently over cocktails, or tell with gusto around the campfire. They’re usually the long, rambling, roundabout ones that make us slow down and stay awhile. Introducing, the Shaggy Dog
]]>Some people refer to them as yarns, tall tales, even folklore or legends, but as faithful devotees to man’s best friend, we prefer to affectionately call them “shaggy dogs.”
We’ve got plenty of them. (Take our company name, for instance—it has nothing to do with cooking, but we’ll save that for another time.) The history of cast iron has a whole litter of them, too. And we figure, if you have a pan on your stove, let alone if you’re reading this, you’re bound to be someone who has at least a few of your own.
The origin of the “shaggy-dog story” is a shaggy dog in and of itself, with the phrase stemming out of its own long-winded story that starred, you guessed it, a scruffy canine, with the rest of the details remaining somewhat of a mystery to this day.
Sure, these sorts of stories have been around since the dawn of mankind, with cavemen likely sitting around a fire, sharing grumblings about the day’s hunting mishaps or some hand-me-down narrative about how the Wooly Mammoth came to have such a hairy coat—not that unlike our own fowling and fishing trips today. We like to think of them as a universal way for us to not feel so alone out there. A means of finding identity and community, if not humor, in the humdrum of our daily lives.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, shaggy-dog stories are said to have stemmed out of England or Scotland, but much like cast iron, they also have deep American roots, with the first known reference printed in Esquire magazine in the late 1930s. “The majority of any given group of people are probably all too sane,” wrote writer J.C. Furnas in the first of a series of essays on the loquacious style of storytelling. “One of the more sporting ways of finding out which ones are not is to try shaggy-dog stories on them.”
We don’t know about you, but we welcome a little bit of insanity, though we prefer to call it curiosity, enthusiasm, or even joy. Cooking, at the end of the day, is all about innovation—crazy ideas that actually turned out to be good ones. We like to think Butter Pat was born that way.
So for that, we introduce to you our new feature: The Shaggy Dog. In the name of curiosity. In the pursuit of good ideas. In celebration of how they came to be in the first place. And all that happened along the way. We’ll give a hat-tip in there, too, to seeing things through to the end.
We’ll be using these pages to delve into everything from seasoning techniques and our favorite cast-iron suppers through the history and art form of this ancient craft. To ruminate on purpose, and practice, and sense of place, with the occasional hoot about our own actual shaggy dogs thrown in for good measure. We think you’ll be able to relate.
And we’ll do our best to get to the point.