A FAMILY TRADITION
I think it’s fair to say that cast-iron cookware solidified my relationship with my mother-in-law.
When Robby and I were dating, I met his parents, Bobby and Mary Frances, during one of their trips to Tallahassee. I liked them instantly and enjoyed seeing them during subsequent visits. But when Robby and I started to talk about marriage, he asked me to travel more than two hours to his family’s home in Crestview, Florida. The plan was to spend the weekend visiting with his parents, meeting his grandmother, and seeing his hometown. This was a big step for us, so of course I was nervous!
We got to the house just in time for dinner, and Mary Frances served us Taco Soup. I like a wide variety of foods, but this was new to me, and the mental image of tacos in soup wasn’t very appealing. But then I smelled it—the delicious aroma of cumin with pinto beans, corn, and tomato sauce. When they passed around the toppings—corn chips, sour cream, and shredded cheese—all my nervous energy melted away, leaving only a sense of familial comfort. It was like I was sitting at my own mother’s table.
I don’t remember exactly what Mary Frances cooked the rest of that weekend, but it probably included a roast and hand-picked field peas and corn—the kind of food you hope they serve in Heaven. What I do remember clearly is the cast-iron cookware Mary Frances used with every meal. Those big, dark skillets resurrected memories of my own childhood. I became nostalgic for a simpler time, for fresh veggies picked straight from the farm, and big family get-togethers fueled by down-home cookin’.
Mary Frances and I bonded quickly over food. She loved my appreciation and enthusiasm for her cooking, and she rewarded me with a gift: a small cast-iron pot with lid. She insisted it wasn’t an expensive piece, but to me it was priceless. Not only did it represent the bond with my new family but it also helped me reconnect with my childhood by enabling me to cook those same wholesome meals I grew up on.
In honor of her contribution to this book, check out Mary Frances’s Taco Soup recipe in chapter 6, “Cooking with Cast Iron.”
Reconnecting with the Past
Some deeply ingrained memories can only be triggered through tastes and smells.
The more time I spent around cast iron as an adult, the more I waxed nostalgic.
I began to remember countless family gatherings, including those from the summers we spent in Franklin, North Carolina. We would pick veggies in the morning and then sit on the porch watching the rain while we shelled peas and shucked corn. When it stopped raining, we kids would play in the cold creek in the backyard until it was finally time to come in for supper. Those were the simple, languid days of childhood.
At some point, Mom acquired a cast-iron skillet from her mother-in-law. She never did get the hang of frying chicken, but she used that skillet daily to fry or sauté other meats and veggies, as well as cook simple skillet meals like beefaroni for my sister and me.
When we moved into a new house with modern appliances, Mom was afraid her heavy skillet would break the glass stove top, so she replaced it with a lighter aluminum pan. I was thirteen years old at the time, so it’s not surprising that I quickly forgot all about growing up on cast-iron dinners.
That is, until the tastes and smells of Mary Frances’s cooking triggered my memory.
Perhaps that’s what comfort food really is. It’s a meal that, through its unique aromas and flavors, brings to mind a happy place and time. It takes us back, reconnecting us with something long gone but still treasured.
I’m thankful those cast-iron dinners have helped me reconnect with my past. I hope they can do the same for you.
In my in-laws’ house sits a small wood stove. Now painted black, the antique used to be a daily workhorse for Robby’s grandparents. A few months ago, his family sat down to tell me its unusual history.
Pa and Grandma King were subsistence farmers, which is a nice way of saying they lived off the land and didn’t have a lot of money to show for it. They owned about forty acres, on which they grew everything from _ potatoes to fruit trees, as well as sugar cane, which they harvested and boiled to make syrup. For meat, they raised chickens, pigs, and cows. They also tended to numerous bee boxes, harvesting and selling the honey under their own label.
Pa King’s cast-iron stove with a kettle on the burner.
Pa King was a mechanic by trade, but he could have been an engineer. Back in the 1970s—long before YouTube made homesteading popular—Pa built his own solar-powered hot-water heater out of 4' × 6' sheets of glass and tin that he painted black. A water hose fed into the contraption, which then emptied into a large drum used as a temporary holding tank until the water was drawn into the house. On hot, sunny days, this was sufficient to provide hot water for the kitchen and bathroom.
But the solar panels didn’t work well on cloudy days—a challenge Pa King gladly accepted. After a while, he came up with a new contraption, this time using that small cast-iron stove.
Those kinds of stoves were simple in nature. A small chamber in the bottom, called a fire pit, held pieces of wood. Once ignited, the wood created smoke, which was ventilated outside the house through a pipe. The fire would heat the entire stove, which then radiated heat throughout the room. Pots and kettles could also be placed on top of the stove to cook.
Pa King’s cast-iron stove with the doors and vents open—see the holes he drilled?
When the Kings purchased a second, larger cast-iron stove, Pa turned the smaller one into a boiler. Somehow, he drilled two holes through that tough metal. Through one hole, he inserted a galvanized water pipe that was connected to the well. He coiled the pipe inside the fire box and threaded it out the other hole and into a holding tank outside. Then all he had to do was light the fire in the stove and turn on the spigot. The water would pump through the makeshift boiler to be stored in the holding tank until it was piped back into the house. This system worked so well he later built a larger version with an insulated, fifty-gallon holding tank. This way, Grandma King was able to have hot water whenever she wanted it.
When their neighbors upgraded to the latest glass-top stoves, the Kings continued to use their wood-burning cast-iron stoves. This was how they had lived their entire lives, and they saw no need to change. Plus, wood burns cheaper than electricity. So, the Kings lived like folks did in the early 1900s, right up until 1996 when health reasons finally caused them to move from their farmland to be closer to family.
Pa King passed away years ago, but Grandma King celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday this year. She still loves to garden and prefers to cook on cast iron. Some things never change.
The Sweet Job of Syrup Making
When you think of a kettle, you probably imagine a small pot that is used to boil water on the stove, but the term has been used for hundreds of years to refer to cast-iron pots of all sizes. These were often hung over a hearth or outdoor fire.
However, on eighteenth-century plantations, the kettle was repurposed to render syrup out of sugar cane. The cane stalks were first cut down by hand and then crushed using a mill powered by animals (usually donkeys or horses). Next, the cane juice was heated in the kettle, where water evaporated and the juice was clarified until it condensed into syrup.
Robby loved staying on the farm with Pa and Grandma King.
Kettles suspended over an open fire.
Robby’s father and grandmother brave the steam to ladle impurities from the cane syrup.
My sister’s family has a large kettle with a famous past. As the story goes, the Confederates were gathered in nearby Olustee, Florida, waiting for the Yankees to arrive and the battle to begin. During the Civil War, locals were expected to do their part by feeding the soldiers. My sister’s great-great-grandparents used their syrup kettle to cook a modest meal—probably hominy, a type of mush made out of corn—for the Confederate soldiers, who went on to win the Battle of Olustee.
In the nineteenth century, these kettles were used by subsistence farmers, like Robby’s grandparents. Ever the mechanic, Pa King used a mechanical press, powered by a small engine like a car battery and a belt, to squeeze the juice out of the cane. The juice was then placed in a massive syrup kettle measuring more than four feet in diameter. A wall of brick surrounded the kettle and raised it nearly two feet off the ground. Pa King built a fire box within the brick so it could be heated to 227 degrees Fahrenheit. The kettle and its brick platform were sheltered from bugs by a small screened-in building just big enough for the family to stand in while they worked.
And it was definitely a family affair!
Once the kettle was heated, the impurities in the cane juice rose to the top and needed to be removed using a ladle. Since it would take eight hours or more for the juice to cook down to syrup, the whole family took turns ladling the syrup and keeping the fire lit. Their payment: gallons of pure cane syrup to enjoy all year long.
Today, large antique syrup kettles can sell for thousands of dollars. Many are being turned into water features or fire pits. However, few people take the time—or even have the know-how—to make homemade cane syrup. Perhaps we will rediscover this traditional way of life and resurrect it, much like we’ve done with cast-iron cooking.
The Kings used this kettle to boil hogs and wash clothes. Even though it’s much smaller than the one they used to make syrup, it’s big enough to hold me (at nine months pregnant) and our hen Lula Bell!
