What is it about the cooking in cast iron pans that makes you feel so good?
I think the cast iron pans and Dutch ovens are wonderful, both because of the history of how they have been used and because they feel “real”, solid and permanent. You can feel good about the trace amount of iron you are getting from the food cooked in them. You can feel good about not polluting the environment with fumes, and because the cast iron pans are totally recycleable. But they are not for those with weak or arthritic fingers and wrists. I had an uncle, who was a life long bachelor. He always had a big black dog, and it was always called Babe. Sometimes it was female, and sometimes a male, but it was always big and black. He used cast iron skillets and kept a big bucket of sand on his porch. No water ever touched his pans! He scrubbed them out with sand and wiped them on … well, what ever was handy. (He wasn’t a very particular house keeper, except for those pans!) They were beautiful, and as shiny black as Babe. My mother used the cast iron skillets that were in the farm ho
