[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="168"] Advice courtesy of Instagram[/caption] Look inside the average modern kitchen cabinet and you will likely find a morgue of warped, defaced, and retired plasticine non-stick pans. For over 60 years, the cookware industry has prospered on a model of planned obsolescence, cajoling...
“Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina; old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape.” Melancholy Objects: On Photography, by Susan Sontag, Picador, 2001. Retooling has necessitated excavating over a decade of material...
A curious meme has popped up on the interwebs regarding seasoning of non-stick pans, possibly because cast iron seasoning is on more peoples’ radars these days, but just as possibly because cookware that suggests it’s seasonable gets associated with cookware that is definitely seasonable, which...
There are times in the year when it seems we cannot keep shipping boxes in the shop, when we’re receiving deliveries from our box maker every few weeks. This is partly because we still have not mastered anticipation of demand, but also because in a...
This is a condensed version of a conversation that took place on Chowhound a couple of years back, or I should say, took a couple of years to unfurl completely. Believe it or not, there are more than a few people who take a keen...
About 3 offices, 2 homes, 1.5 Presidents and 4000-odd pots and pans ago, I received an email from the author of Doctor Kinney’s Housekeeper, a novel of frontier fiction lauded in reviews as impeccably researched, sparely inscribed, colorfully populated and, in more than a few...
When the copper cookware manufacturer Waldow Company of Brooklyn, NY went out of business in 1979 it was observed that its founder, Bruno Waldow, was in his 80s, the company was the last copper cookware manufacturer in the US, and none of his heirs elected...
The percentage of young people beginning to cook for themselves is ticking up for the first time in over two generations. They are bringing with them an increased awareness and conscientiousness about all ingredients, the concept of which has recently (and rightly) begun including the...
Just a few months from now it will be a wonder that anyone could ever have been lured in — the hyper-promotion, the audacious lies, the incoherent gibberish, the lack of substance, even the artificial orange tinting — it will all have been so obvious...
“Also spare a thought for how the raw materials in your pots and pans were sourced. For example, it takes a lot of energy to refine aluminum, which accounts for the vast majority of top-of-the-range cookware sold in the United States. Mining and processing bauxite...