Cast Iron Cookware.
Buy It Once. Use It Forever.

Irene, 71 — Memphis, TN

“My husband bought a Lodge cast iron skillet in 1987. He was thirty-four years old and he paid eleven dollars for it at a hardware store that doesn’t exist anymore. I thought it was an odd thing to be excited about. Over the years I watched him season it, care for it, refuse to put it in the dishwasher, dry it on the burner every single time. I thought it was fussy. I thought it was more trouble than it was worth.

When he passed in 2019, I was sorting through the kitchen and I nearly put the skillet in the donation box. Something stopped me. I am not sure what. I put it back in the cabinet.

About two weeks later I used it for the first time. I made eggs. They slid out of it like nothing I had ever cooked on. I stood at the stove and cried for about five minutes, which had nothing to do with the eggs. I understood, in that moment, what thirty-two years of care had built. I understood why he dried it on the burner every time.

I am 71 now. I have not bought a single pan in six years. I dry it on the burner every time. The skillet is better than it was when he bought it. I wish I had told him I understood it while he was still here to hear it.”

Margaret, 67 — Outside Atlanta, GA

“My grandmother died at 94. She had lived in the same house for sixty-one years. When my family came to sort through her things, I was the one who got the kitchen. There wasn’t much of monetary value. There was a Griswold No. 8 skillet that her mother had bought in the 1930s. It is older than my grandmother was.

I opened the box it was packed in and I was not ready for what happened next. The smell hit me before I even saw the pan. Sixty years of bacon grease and cornbread and chicken and the particular combination of smells that I had only ever known as ‘Grandma’s kitchen.’ I sat down on the floor right there in the hallway and held the pan and sobbed. Not because she was gone — I had made a kind of peace with that. But because the pan remembered her when I was afraid I would start to forget.

I took it home and I have used it every morning since. I did not re-season it. I did not wash it with soap. I wiped it out and oiled it and put it on the burner the way she always did. Whatever is built up in that seasoning is hers. I intend to keep adding to it, not strip it away.

My daughter is 41. She already knows that skillet is hers when I am gone. She has been told the story twice. She will tell it again.”

Evelyn, 69 — Rural Alabama

“My great-grandmother bought a Dutch oven in 1931. She was a sharecropper’s wife in central Alabama and she paid for it in installments. I know this because my grandmother told me the story every time she used it. She said her mother had saved the money from selling eggs over the course of eight months. Eight months of egg money for one pot. That is the Depression. That is what things meant then.

My grandmother kept the pot her whole life. Sometime in the 1970s, when she realized she could not always remember exactly when she’d gotten things, she took a permanent marker and wrote inside the lid: ‘Bought by Mama, 1931, Depression time. Never let it rust.’ That is the only instruction she ever wrote down about anything in her life. Four words of care for a pot she expected to outlast her.

The pot came to me when my grandmother passed. I was fifty-one. I had cooked with cast iron my whole adult life, so I knew exactly what I was receiving. I did not cry when the lawyer read the will. I cried when I got home and opened the pot and read what she had written.

I am 69 now. I follow her instruction every single morning. I dry it on the burner. I wipe it with oil. I put it away. The same thing she did. The same thing her mother did. Someday someone will write another line under what she wrote. I have been thinking for eighteen years about what that line should say.”

Robert, 71 — Eastern Tennessee

“My father bought a Lodge Dutch oven in 1958. He was twenty-eight years old, newly married, and watching every cent. He paid four dollars and seventy-five cents for it — I know the exact amount because he kept the receipt in his wallet until the wallet fell apart. He said his mother had told him that a man who had a good cast iron pot would never truly go hungry. He believed her. He bought the pot before he bought a television.

He made his mother’s bean soup in that pot every Sunday of my childhood from 1961 until the Sunday before he died in 2020 at eighty-nine years old. Sixty-two years of Sunday bean soup. The recipe was his mother’s — dried navy beans, smoked ham hock, onion, a bay leaf, salt, black pepper. Nothing else. He never wrote it down. He said if you needed to write it down you hadn’t made it enough times yet.

After he died I found the Dutch oven in the back of the cabinet, wrapped in a clean dish towel the same way his mother had always stored hers. I unwrapped it and made the bean soup that Sunday. It took me three tries to get it right — he was right that I had not made it enough times to not need the recipe.

I am 71. My grandchildren come over on Sundays now. They are nine and eleven. I make the soup. I tell them it is their great-great-grandmother’s recipe in their great-grandfather’s pot. They are young enough that they do not fully understand what that means yet. But they always ask for seconds. I think that is the beginning of understanding.”

Beverly, 65 — Citrus County, FL

“Hurricane Idalia came through in August 2023 and knocked out our power for six days. I have a two-burner Coleman propane camp stove that I keep on a shelf in the garage for exactly this reason. I have had it for twelve years and used it maybe four times before Idalia. After the storm I set it up on the back porch and it ran for six days straight.

My cast iron Dutch oven went on that stove every morning and every evening. The first day I made scrambled eggs and toast on the griddle. The second day I made black beans and rice from canned beans and rice I had stored. The third day I made chicken soup from a whole chicken I had thawed from the freezer before it could go bad. The fourth day I made cornbread in the Dutch oven, lid on, sitting over a low flame, the way my grandmother had shown me when I was ten years old.

My neighbor Linda knocked on my back door on day three. She looked exhausted. She said she could smell something cooking and she had not had a hot meal since the storm. She had an electric stove and no camp stove and had been eating crackers and peanut butter. I brought her in and fed her and her husband that evening and for the next three days after that. She wept when I put a bowl of hot soup in front of her. She said she had not realized how much a hot meal mattered until she went without one for three days.

When the power came back on she came over with a plant from her garden and a thank-you card. The card said she was buying a cast iron Dutch oven and a camp stove the following week. She did. I know because she sent me a photo.”

Dorothy, 74 — North Georgia

“I am seventy-four years old and I have never owned a non-stick pan. Not because I made a decision about it — simply because my mother cooked with cast iron and her mother cooked with cast iron and the idea of cooking any other way never presented itself as necessary. The skillet I use every morning is the same one my mother used from 1964 until she was eighty-one years old and couldn’t manage the weight anymore. I was fifty-seven when she handed it to me. She wiped it out, oiled it, and handed it to me at the kitchen table like she was handing me a deed to something.

The seasoning in that pan has sixty years in it. When I make eggs in the morning they slide out without a trace. My grandchildren have watched me do it and they do not believe it at first. They think non-stick means a coating. I show them the pan and they look for the coating and they don’t find one. Then I explain what seasoning is and how it builds and that the pan gets more non-stick the older it gets, not less. I can watch them try to square this with everything they thought they knew about cooking.

My daughter asked me last Thanksgiving if I would leave the pan to her. I said yes. She is forty-eight. She will be a good steward. She already knows about drying it on the burner, about oiling it warm, about never soaking it. Her daughter is twenty-two and has a small apartment and a hot plate and has already asked her mother when she gets the skillet.

Four generations. One pan. Bought by a woman named Edna in 1964 for three dollars and change. Still cooking breakfast every morning in 2026. That is what cast iron is.”

Patricia, 68 — North Florida

“My husband gave me a Lodge cast iron skillet for Christmas in 1982. We had been married fourteen months. I unwrapped it and I looked at him and I said, ‘This is what you got me.’ Not a question. A statement with a particular tone in it. He looked embarrassed and said he thought it was practical and would last a long time. I put it in the cabinet and went back to using the non-stick pans I already had.

Somewhere around 1987 I started using it for cornbread because someone told me cast iron made a better crust. They were right. Then I started using it for pancakes on Sunday mornings because a Lodge skillet holds heat in a way that produces a perfect golden bottom that I had never been able to get on a non-stick pan. Then I started using it for chicken. Then for bacon. Somewhere in the early 1990s I stopped using the non-stick pans entirely and I have never gone back.

I have replaced that stove three times in forty-four years. I have replaced every other pot and pan I own at least twice, some of them three times. The cast iron skillet is unchanged. Better, actually — the seasoning is extraordinary now, built from forty-four years of pancakes and chicken and cornbread and Sunday breakfasts. It is worth more than the day it was bought, which is not something you can say about almost anything else in my kitchen.

Last year on our anniversary my husband asked me what I wanted. I told him I still had the cast iron from 1982. He was quiet for a moment and then he smiled in a way I recognized as the smile of a man who has been vindicated after forty-four years of waiting. He earned it.”

Louise, 61 — Coastal South Carolina

“My mother raised seven children in a three-bedroom house in rural South Carolina and she cooked every meal of her adult life in two cast iron skillets and a Dutch oven. Three pieces of cookware. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, forty-one years of marriage, seven children, dozens of grandchildren who came through that kitchen on holidays. Three pieces of cookware that she bought in 1961 and never replaced.

When she moved into assisted living at eighty-eight, my sister came to help clear out the kitchen. My sister has a beautiful set of stainless steel pans that she is very proud of. She looked at my mother’s cast iron and said she didn’t have room for it. So the pans came to me. I was fifty-four years old and I had never cooked with cast iron in my life. I had a set of non-stick pans I had bought at Target on sale.

The first morning I had my mother’s skillets, I made eggs. They came out perfectly — not because I did anything right, but because sixty years of seasoning does the work for you. I stood at the stove and called my sister on the phone. I told her she had made a terrible mistake. She laughed and said I could keep them. I told her I intended to.

My daughter is thirty-two. She has a small apartment in Charleston and a two-burner induction cooktop and she has already informed me that those pans are hers when I am gone. My mother would have found this very funny and also exactly right. You do not own cast iron. You hold it for the next person.”

George, 73 — Clearwater, FL

“I am seventy-three years old and I take seven prescription medications daily. My cardiologist, my internist, and my gastroenterologist have all at various points told me that reducing my overall chemical exposure is worth thinking about at my age, given the number of compounds my liver is already processing. None of them specifically mentioned cookware. But when I started looking into it myself, the research on PTFE degradation was enough for me.

I threw away four non-stick pans and bought a Lodge 10-inch skillet and a Lodge 6-quart Dutch oven. Total cost was about eighty-five dollars. I seasoned them myself following the instructions on Lodge’s website, and I made my first meal in them the following evening.

That was four years ago. I have not cooked on anything else since. The quality of my cooking has genuinely improved — cast iron holds heat in a way that produces a sear on meat that I could never achieve on a non-stick pan. My wife commented on it within the first week. She asked what I had changed. I told her I’d bought a thirty-five-dollar skillet. She looked at me for a moment and said, ‘We should have done this twenty years ago.’

I do not know with certainty that the non-stick pans were doing me harm. I know with certainty that the cast iron is not.”

Carol, 68 — Gulf Coast Florida

“I have rheumatoid arthritis in both hands and I was convinced for years that cast iron was not something I could manage. I had watched my mother cook with it and I remembered the skillets as heavy and awkward, and at sixty-eight with grip strength that is maybe forty percent of what it was at forty, I assumed that door was closed to me.

What changed my mind was my neighbor Helen, who is seventy-nine and has been cooking with cast iron since she was a girl and whose hands are not noticeably better than mine. I watched her make eggs one morning and she never lifted the skillet at all. She slid it across the burner. She tilted it to pour. She used both hands to move it from the stove to the trivet on her counter. The whole operation required almost no grip strength. What it required was technique.

She showed me how to season a new skillet properly. Thin coats, high heat, three cycles. She showed me the daily care routine — the stiff brush under hot water while still warm, the burner drying, the thin coat of oil, the paper towel wipe-down. The whole thing takes three minutes. She said her mother had shown her the same routine sixty years ago and she had done it every morning since.

I bought a Lodge 8-inch skillet — slightly lighter than the 10-inch — and I have cooked in it every day for two years. The last non-stick pan I bought cost forty-two dollars and lasted fourteen months before the coating started flaking. I am finished with that.”