I have made a thing of great beauty. And all it took was wire wool and elbow grease
Frantically scanning my locked-down world for sources of distraction, my field of vision continues to narrow. This week, an old cast-iron frying pan reproached me from the bottom of a drawer. It was coated in rust and other dubious stuff of many colours. If it didn’t weigh as much as a small car, I would have bunged it in the recycling by now, but it would have fallen straight through the bottom of the bag.
It turns out that if you search “restore cast-iron pans” on the internet, you won’t be short of advice. There are many tutorials on the subject, posted by devotees of cast-iron cookware. During all of these, at some stage, someone will spit out the two dirtiest words in this world: “non-stick pan”. “So-called” normally precedes those words. Non-stick? Pah! These babies are the original and best.
One YouTube cleaning lesson clocks in at just shy of 20 minutes. The guy coos over a “rusty old Wagner Ware” and “a really nice Griswold number nine”. How thoughtfully he puzzles over one he can’t identify, mysteriously marked with only the legend “No 8 – B7”.
Before long, I was cooking my pan in a screamingly hot oven for two hours. Donning my homemade old-sock face-covering for protection from the smoke, I readied myself for the next stages: washing off the debris; scrubbing with wire wool and salt; heating up; rubbing with flaxseed oil (which smells unpleasantly of fish for some reason) and baking for another hour.
What emerged, joyously, is a thing of great beauty. To cook with, it really is non-stick – and will remain so, I am assured, as long as after each use it is wiped, scrubbed with salt, rinsed, dried, heated and rubbed anew with fishy-smelling oil.
Any old iron, anyone? I am itching to get my hands on another old wreck to work some magic on.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist