My Cast Iron Skillet

My husband discovered a treasure while rummaging around under the sink in our garage apartment in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We were newlyweds and this was to be our first home.

The cast iron skillet didn’t look like much to me. I was a naïve art student from Seattle, Washington, just 20 years old. All I saw was a filthy frying pan filled with gunk that looked like glue. But my mother-in-law, Maw Maw as we called her, knew its value. She gave it an earnest cleaning.

“Girl, you gotta make cornbread, “Maw Maw told me. “Your husband was raised on cornbread.”     

Hmmm…I thought a skillet was only used for frying meat.

With help from Maw Maw, I gradually learned the many uses of the versatile cast iron skillet. Not just cornbread but everything from hamburgers to chicken to pot roast absorbed the skillet’s flavors. A trusty skillet goes from stove to oven, a useful trait in the days before microwaves. Although my skillet wasn’t coated with Teflon, cornbread slid out with ease.

An iron skillet is more than a utensil. Over time, it becomes a seasoning, an ingredient as essential as salt. When you buy an iron skillet, you wash it and rub oil into it, but it’s not truly seasoned. It takes years for the seasoning to be absorbed and become part of the skillet.

The cast iron skillet my husband, happened upon 52 years ago helped me, a wife born and bred on the West Coast, become a serviceable Southern cook. Oh, I could never make buttermilk biscuits like Maw Maw; I had no hope of competing with her on that score. But I learned to make cornbread, which my husband mashed up in buttermilk or soaked up pot liquor (the liquid from a pot of butter beans, crowder peas, or pole beans).

Cornbread baked in my cast iron skillet became the basis of the stuffing I used for the Christmas turkey. What were Yankees thinking of when they used white bread which formed doughy lumps? 

A thick black crust accumulated on my skillet. Once in a while I would try to chisel some off so it wouldn’t become a fire hazard. The grease made it heavier, which I reasoned caused that wonderful brown crust to form on the bottom of the cornbread while the inside remained moist and porous. The pot roasts I made in the cast iron skillet were tender the carrots and potatoes just right. The flavor of that gravy lingers in memory—one of us got a bay leaf in their’s.