A Cast Iron Skillet

is like the post office.

The United States Postal Service’s unofficial motto is a line from Herodotus, engraved on the lintel of the New York City Post Office: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Off the top of my head, I would figure that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays cast iron skillets, either. Cast iron has existed since the sixth century in China and was the predominant cooking ware until about 1900. Cast iron skillets are extremely heavy, and whenever I have owned one, I’ve found myself picturing it as a good go-to weapon against a home intruder.

If the cast iron subreddit is to be believed, however, cast iron would actually be extremely sensitive to snow and rain. On this subreddit people constantly remind one another not to wash their cast iron skillets, lest they damage their protective coating or “seasoning”—the forum is rife with desperate posts like “my roommate ran my cast iron skillet through the dishwasher!” But even if you slip up and wash it, you can always bake more oil onto it, creating a new nonstick coating.

What I’m assuming are unseasoned and seasoned cast iron skillets—though to be honest, I don’t really know that much about how they should look.

Cast iron skillets are extremely popular among people my age, which like many millennial trends is a bit counterintuitive. Cast iron is experiencing a resurgence because of newfound skepticism about artificial nonstick coatings, and as usual, my generation has overshot a bit in reaching back to the traditions of yesteryear—skipping the mid-20th-century aluminum and reaching for pans that make us think of covered wagons and bear hunting.