Measure Free Hippie Cook

Cast Iron Skillets and Great Scratch Cooks

19 March 2010 by Jean Johnson

Facebook friends, Laura and Emily, commented on my cast iron skillet, so thought it time to share this entry from the pages of Cooking Beyond Measure. There’s both a video of me reading and below that the text so you can follow along. Enjoy…

Cooking Beyond Measure, p. 72.
On Roasting Vegetables—

Vegetables roast marvelously well from low to high temperatures. On highs around 450 F, colors are preserved but you have to watch things like a hawk. Medium ovens of 350 work well too, and depending on what you’re roasting, munchies will be yours in a half hour. Then again if you’re going out for a walk you can turn the oven to 250. When you return, you’ll have the sweetest caramelized morsels a soul could ever ask for.

My preferred roasting vehicle is—or was—Jessie Branom’s extra large cast iron skillet. The iron and the sides of the pan cradle the vegetables in a cocoon of heat that caramelizes, and the veggies y turn out sweet and golden. Baking trays work too, but as you’ll discover if you use both vehicles like I usually do, the results cast iron produces are decidedly superior. Yet at this writing, a new over-sized cast iron skillet is on my shopping list. Here’s why.

Jessie Branom and my mother were close friends in Phoenix during the early 1960s where they raised their families. Jessie had two children; Mom had four. So the women reasoned that my mother should have the big frying pan Jessie owned, and Jessie should have my mother’s medium sized skillet. The swap was made, and much later after Mom passed away Jesse’s skillet came to me. I used it for years but as a historian who thinks in terms of centuries, I’m aware of how numbered our days are—and how things can get lost in the shuffle at the end of life.

So it was that Thanksgiving of 2007 when Jessie’s first granddaughter married, I posted the skillet swathed in wedding wrap. As I wrote to the young bride, Jenny Branom Patberg, “Great scratch cooks have used this skillet for a half century. May its journey go on.”

Postscript: I have by this time, 3 years after the above was written, purchased a new skillet which has definitely earned its keep and love as a new member of the kitchen family.

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