I am a sad, sad excuse for a Southerner. I do not fish, nor do I waterski. I cannot tolerate cheerleading. I never cook grits. My children do not call me "Ma'am." I have not, nor will I ever, set foot inside a monster truck stadium. And now this: I cannot season a cast iron skillet. To a non-Southerner, the very idea that such a thing could prove upsetting must seem ridiculous, or perhaps "quaint." But to a born-and-bred Louisiana girl, admitting this shortcoming is tantamount to saying the "Civil War" instead of the "War Between the States."
But this is a problem, I mean it. I want to cook in cast iron because I know it's healthy, I'm cheap (I already own the pans, and they'll last forever if, uh, properly seasoned), and because it's part of my heritage. My hundred-one-year-old Alabama grandmother recently passed along a number of items from her home that she no longer needs, and what one of my cousins wanted most was her collection of cast iron cookware--all of it well-seasoned, you might imagine. Lucky.
One of this grandmother's eight children and a fabulous down-home cook, my father is a master at getting the crust of cornbread just right in one of his skillets. He and his cast iron seem to have a longtime understanding of sorts, but my cast iron skillets and I have a rocky relationship, and it's making me grumpy. I've read about various seasoning methods and have tried several with differing degrees of success over the past decade or so. A few years ago, I even (gulp) threw out a small skillet after I gloomily set it aside, only to have it rust to what I thought was dismal, beyond-repair excess. I've seen sticky, goopy residue in a skillet after a couple of Crisco-coated hours at 500 degrees, and a whole-lotta' nothin' after peanut oil at a similar temperature. I've also had a skillet that appeared, on its surface, to have the right gleam, but the next morning's scrambled eggs still stuck. It's as if the seasoning didn't really "take." It's as if these skillets do not like me at all.
In near-despair the other day after yet another failed seasoning attempt (once again heating and smelling up the whole kitchen and dining room and setting off the smoke detector), I called out to Husband, "I just don't understand this pan!" Husband, exhausted at the computer from too much online masters-level education coursework, called back, "Do not engage me in this discussion!" What was I to do? Why, read an online tutorial, of course! Coat pan with vegetable oil, put in oven, bake for 2 hours at 250. What could be easier? This, surely, will work beautifully! Wrong. My skillets still betray me, mocking my Southernness more each day. Time to get on the horn to Dad.