A Piedmont Porchlight Story

If somebody ever builds the Museum of Ordinary Things, there’d better be a cast-iron skillet sitting right there in the middle. Not hanging on the wall. Not polished until it shines. I mean the kind that’s black as midnight, and heavy enough to make a young fellow grunt when he picks it up. It’s been seasoned by so many years of bacon grease and biscuits that folks swear nothing tastes the same without it.

I got to thinking about that one morning at the Coffee Cup. Hattie was frying bacon in the kitchen. The whole restaurant smelled like breakfast ought to smell. Curtis closed his eyes. “That’s a cast-iron skillet.”

Hattie looked around the doorway. “You can smell the difference?”

“Honey, I can hear the difference.”

That made me laugh. Funny thing about cast iron. Before you ever saw breakfast, you heard it. That bell-like sound when it accidentally hit something. That gentle sizzle. Not loud. Not in a hurry. Just patient. Like it knew breakfast would get there when it got there.

Hattie set a plate in front of me. “Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“The skillet.”

“It’s hotter than the hinges of hell.”

Curtis grinned. “My mama used to say the same thing.”

“So did mine.”

I looked down at the eggs. “You know, I don’t reckon anybody ever really owned a cast-iron skillet.”

Curtis raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“No.”

“They just looked after it for the next generation.” That settled over the booth for a minute. My Mawmaw had several. One of them is in my kitchen right now. Mama had one. And somewhere along the way, it quit being cookware. It became family.

Funny thing about cast iron. You didn’t wash it. Not really. You respected it. Hot water. A brush. Maybe a little salt if things got stubborn. Dry it. Oil it. Put it back where it belonged.

Anybody who reached for washdishin’ soap, usually got corrected before their hand found the bottle.

Hattie laughed. “My granddaughter tried to soak mine once.”

“What’d you do?”

“I explained the error of her ways.”

“Calmly?”

“Oh, goodness no.” The whole Coffee Cup laughed.

Outside, Earl Johnson walked past carrying a paper sack. Curtis looked at me. “Charlie Benson?”

“No.”

“Earl.”

“I know.”

“But with that paper sack, I got nervous.”

Even Hattie had to laugh at that. When things settled down again, I looked toward the kitchen. The skillet was still sitting on the stove. Quiet. Doing what it’d done for longer than anybody could remember. Making breakfast. Making memories. Making people think home wasn’t quite so far away.

Funny thing about cast iron. The older it gets, the better it becomes. I wish people worked more like that.

Hattie came back with the coffee pot and topped off our cups. “You know what my mama used to say?”

“What?”

“‘If you feed somebody from a cast-iron skillet, they’ll remember your cooking long after they forget the recipe.”

I smiled. “I reckon she’s right.”

Because nobody ever says, “I miss that frying pan.” They say, “I miss Mama’s biscuits.” Or, “I’d give anything for one more piece of Mawmaw’s cornbread.”

The skillet never wanted the credit. It was content to stay in the background helping love arrive at the table three times a day.

If somebody ever builds that Museum of Ordinary Things, don’t lock the cast-iron skillet behind glass. Put it on an old stove. Let a little bacon sizzle. Let a pan of cornbread rise. Let the room smell like Sunday morning. Because a cast-iron skillet was never meant to be admired. It was meant to gather hungry people around a table.

And I reckon that’s one of the holiest jobs an old piece of iron ever had.