frying pans

[Page Stephens]

Larry,

What you do is to put some cooking oil into them and then bake them to the
point where they get so hot that the oil soaks into the iron. You then get
rid of the oil which is left.

Then they are ready to use.

This may be folklore but it has always worked for me while attempting to use
them off the shelf as they are sold has never worked because everything you
attempt to cook in them sticks to the pan.

We used to call this "curing the pan" and perhaps it didn't do us any good
but I can tell you from my own experience that uncured pans didn't work as
well as cured pans did.

I will now give you Glenn Ohrlin's little secret about making pancakes. You
add a little bit of cooking oil to his and my secret recipe for making
pancakes before you make up the batter and they come out absolutely perfect.
This makes certain that the pancakes do not stick to the bottom of the pan.

Now, since this has always vexed me, why almost no one above the Mason Dixon
line knows how to make corn bread I will give you my grandmother's recipe.

Corn bread is made of corn flour and doesn't have any wheat flour or sugar
in it.

To make it you take a seasoned pan and mix up corn flour with a little bit
of bacon and or bacon fat, add water and an egg white or two in order to
hold it together.

Then you bake it until it is ready to eat, i.e. hard and crisp.

The stuff they call corn bread up north which is basically wheat flour and
sugar with only a little bit of corn flour is an abomination sold to suckers
by restaurant chains.

In other words it has no more resemblance to corn bread than a snake has
hips.

Enough said.

Page Stephens

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 10:28 AM
Subject: Re: frying pans


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: frying pans
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>
> At 10:21 AM -0600 2/18/04, Page Stephens wrote:
> >  Out of sheer curiosity does anyone out there know how to properly
season a
> >cast iron skillet or for that matter any other cast iron cooker like a
Dutch
> >oven?
> >
> >It takes a little knowledge or you end up with everything sticking to the
> >pan since they cannot be used off the shelf.
> >
> >If you do it right, however, the implement will work like a charm and who
> >needs Teflon.
> >...
> >Never, and I say never did we allow a drop of water or for that matter
oil
> >touch those sacred pans which I assume Glenn is still using.
> >
> Well, this is a bit off-topic, but while it's standard wisdom to
> avoid soap and water (much less dishwashers) in cleaning one's
> cast-iron skillets/pans, I've never heard of avoiding oil.  I season
> them with oil.  In fact, I don't see how I would use one without "a
> drop of...oil", since I usually cook with oil in them.  (They are
> great used dry, though, for such tasks as roasting spices.)
>
> So I'll bite--how do you season them without oil?
>
> larry