Loving the Making
“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......
13 May, 2026
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......
22 February, 2025
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......
01 December, 2024
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......
30 June, 2022
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......
29 April, 2021
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......
08 March, 2021
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......
31 October, 2020
Given the subtle reinforcements everywhere (e.g., in recipes: “Using a non-stick pan…”) it’s easy to see how anyone could believe that plastics do everything pure metals have done for centuries just as safely and somehow even better. The success of those messaging campaigns emerged over......
29 January, 2020
In 2009, just about at the bottom of The Great Recession, Brooklyn Copper Cookware got started. When I realized the cookware I loved using most was no longer made in the US, a challenge emerged – clear, simple, and daunting. Produce the finest cooking tools......
16 December, 2019
The ductile iron casting foundry that casts BCC handles uses the Roberts-Sinto process, which requires just three operators to manage a machine that is capable of producing thousands of castings from BCC’s match plates (casting tools). This is a lot faster, cleaner, safer and much less wasteful......
19 December, 2018
The hand that succeeds at wipe tinning has the deftest of touches. Between managing a pan that has been heated to over 600℉ and ladling molten 500℉ tin into it, flame, steam and smoke compromise a good deal of visual perception. A tin smith is......
06 September, 2018
What goes into your stockpot…. and what goes on inside your stockpot...
01 September, 2017
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…......
29 November, 2016
“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......
04 June, 2016
Ageless Copper Predictably, we have serious misgivings about cooking on plastics and stainless steel. But we respect stainless steel. For instance, in bike parts and sailing tackle, if it’s not aluminum alloy or carbon fiber, stainless is what you want pretty much everywhere. For cooking,......
20 April, 2015
Organic: how far do you take it? Living in a huge city it’s difficult to even stress organic, much less keep organic (in the sense that one easily keeps kosher or halal here in Brooklyn). The city is a constructed, human artifact – definitionally inorganic, right? Yet under......
20 December, 2011
If you’ve read anything of the main Brooklyn Copper Cookware site, it’s probably clear that I was not born, trained nor ever even politely introduced to manufacturing of any sort before I determined that making cookware was somehow a smart career choice for my so-called......
08 January, 2011