I don’t know about you folks, but walking through a modern store’s home-kitchen section is mind-boggling to me. I had no idea there were so many options out there just to fry something in hot grease. Aluminum, stainless steel, copper, just to name a few. Other pans I saw appeared as though pulled from a future-shock space flick with heat-tempered handles, double-metal base plates, and temperature-detecting finishes. Nuts.

Here enters the humble cast-iron skillet. Clunky, heavy, ugly, but oh-so-perfectly designed for its intended use. In this modern world of newest and best consumerism, it holds its ground like a stubborn old hound dog, unimpressed with all the new labra-doodles. And make no mistake, that old hound dog can still hunt.

When I was ten years old, my boy scout troop organized a backpack trip into the Trinity Mountains in California. That was back in 1975 and the early run of those nice, light, compact, basic aluminum, mess kits. You know the kind I’m talking about – they had the little green plastic cup, small pot enfolded within a larger one, and a lid that was actually the frying pan, and a slim snap-handle that held it all together. All the cool kids had one or wanted one. However, I was not one of them.

On that adventure, as with many others since, I opted for my Granddad’s cast-iron skillet that I still cherish today. Being ten, each scout was allotted only twenty-pounds each of gear and supplies. Eight of my allotted quota was in that old, charcoal-black, heavy skillet. When my troop leader sorted my pack before we were to start walking, he tried to get me to dump that old anvil, telling me I would be too tired when we made camp that night. I refused.

As I recounted for him then, and remember even more fondly now, my Granddad packed that same skillet down the Mattole river from the river’s headwaters to its mouth at the Pacific when he was a young man. He and Grandma followed the river every fall for the deer and steelhead, and that skillet was their do-it-all kitchen, serving as stove, oven, and hot water heater. As my troop leader wold soon come to realize, it was worth every pound.

On that first day on the trail, we boys caught fresh trout, picked wild onions and blackberries, and started our campfires around nightfall. Right away that old iron pan did what it does best – survive and thrive. When the other boys pulled out their shiny, new, light-weight, aluminum mess kits, most had been dented by the journey. The frying handles were bent, and the little plastic cups were often melted like gummy bears from the summer heat. When the few usable ones were put over the fires, the trout seared too quickly and burnt before the juicy meat was ready, and the onions stuck to the unfinished surface. Only the berries steamed with anything appealing, but its hard to screw up wild blackberries.

While their little light space-stoves were black and bent from the heat and flames, my old skillet was just getting warm after its slow burn over the coals. Eight pounds of iron takes a while to get up to cooking heat. As taught by my Pop and Granddad, I first put that old workhorse over the coals to heat it evenly, and laid the onions and greens down with a cup of water. After a few minutes, I scooted the heavy pan over the direct flames and high heat to sear the trout on each side, and when properly seared and sealed, retreated the skillet back over the outer coals. After placing the blackberries in a real tin cup, I portioned a corner of the pan and placed the tin directly on the iron skillet to heat evenly. When all was said and done, a better mountain dinner would have been hard to find.

Coal or flame, on hardwood or ashes, that old iron skillet cooked without so much as a whimper or hiccup. Even better, when the moon rose and the cold snap of the mountain air enveloped the camp, that heavy, old, iron skillet, still holding the heat as only iron can, gently warmed me for nearly two hours wrapped in my washcloth, while the other boys shivered. I slept well that night.

My meal that night was fit for a king, and I’ve cooked many more meals with that iron skillet in the years since. Even now, it sits on my stove as the workhorse it is, ready to serve. Iron will always be iron.

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