Old Friend

Looking at the cooking surface of my small skillet, I realized I had probably eaten its nonstick coating off over the years. Having just bought a new set of pans, it was now time to retire this old, formerly-nonstick skillet. The skillet had been with me for a long time.

The eight-inch pan had been made by Revere, and bought for $10 at a Ben Franklin’s five-and-dime in a small Midwest college town…at least sixteen years ago. At the time, I was just learning to cook for myself, and had become a member of an eighty-person dining co-op. I had read in a comic book that the plain omelet picks up off-smells very easily from pans used to cook aromatics. I am not a particularly voracious consumer of eggs by any stretch. But when I happened upon the affordable, single-serving-sized pan, I knew it would complement the stash of essentials in my messenger bag. So over the following months, I took to carrying my new skillet nestled inside a Frisbee, stuffed next to my books and pens in my messenger bag. (Clearly, nerdiness transcends the boundaries of academics.) When I set the bag on the floor, in class, I could hear the muffled but distinct “thunk” of the skillet settling on the linoleum. When I got hungry and bicycled over to the dining co-op, I could sidle up to the stove, pull out the skillet, and proceed to make myself some variation of a plain egg sandwich—sunny-side-up, over-easy, over-hard, scrambled, poached, omelet (plain), bulls-eye toast…etcetera.

As one might imagine, the novelty of eating an egg sandwich for every snack got old before long. And so gradually, the “pure omelet” rule was bent. It started with a little sharp cheddar dressing up a plain omelet. Once that line had been crossed, the tainting of the pan came freely. It wasn’t long before the skillet lost its sacred status and got put to work with a much wider range of ingredients. Its expanding repertoire began to draw out the full potential of the skillet. As other ingredients began to hit its preheated surface, its charm as a thick-walled pan became more evident. Things would brown nicely, rather than burn rapidly. And when the heat was cranked high, the pan could sear with a satisfying hiss—and sear evenly, at that. As I got lazier about cleaning it thoroughly after each use, it found a new home in the kitchen, where its cooking adventures really began to take off.

Being a little thing, the pan had no problem making it into the Buick Century sedan that took my worldly possessions (and me) to my next home across the country.