Got Skillet?

No doubt you have fond memories of your mother preparing your favorite meal in a cast-iron skillet. In fact you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn't familiar with the extraordinarily popular cast-iron frying pan. But many people are not familiar with the rich history that the traditional frying pan enjoys.

One of the very first methods of cooking food and the first types of cookware ever designed, the popular frying pan has made it to the modern day from prehistory and is popular in all regions of the world. From the north to the south, the east to the west, all over the world, everyone uses the extremely popular black frying pan to cook all manner of foods. From deserts to entres, vegetables to meats, the ubiquitous skillet can prepare almost any food that the cook can dream up.

Despite competition from other types of frying pans, the skillet is far more popular than almost any other implement available.

From the earliest days of mankind, preparing food on a flat, hot surface has become a tradition and is well-known for its inherent flavor enhancing abilities. With so much flavor and so much ease of use, it is no surprise that the skillet has made such a mark on the world of food preparation.

Compared with other types of cookware, it is most dependable for cooking evenly and thoroughly without burning. With a flat surface and low edges, the capacity is somewhat low. But this should not be considered a drawback, as the extremely popular implement is designed to cook small portions very rapidly. With a focus on the detail and attention to the texture of the food, cooking is a simple matter of rapidly turning and moving the food around in order to prevent burning.

With this ease-of-use and extreme functionality, it is easy to see how the popular cast-iron skillet made its way into so many cabinets around the world.

While preparing fried food on the stovetop in rapid fashion is one of the most popular uses for the traditional skillet, it serves a multitude of functions. Caring for the pan it is very simple, despite a conflict of epic proportions on how to clean it. Many will say that you should never wash the pan and that all the different types of food provides seasoning for the pain.

Others will say that you should scrub it down with sand. While few agree on how to care for it, almost everyone will say that it is easily the best product for whatever your cooking purposes might be. In fact, many of these cast-iron skillets are handed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, grandmother to grandchild, and are considered to be something of a family heirloom.

If you were to look through every cabinet in America, it is very likely that you would find one of these old cast-iron frying pans in every house that you look in. Capable of cooking almost any type of food from french fries fried on the stovetop to lasagna baked in the oven, the extremely functional skillet does double duty on the stove, the oven and quite often, the campfire. As a matter of fact, it is the campfire that gave the skillet its start.

It doesn't take much to imagine cowboys, soldiers and travelers doing all the cooking with the extraordinarily easy to use pan. Requiring only a handful of sand to clean, it only makes sense for those on the move to maintain a need for the extremely durable cooking implement.

In the case of the traveling cowboy in the American West, many had only one cooking implement, the skillet. With its ease-of-use and the fact that it didn't require water to clean, it made for a very handy and indestructible tool for the preparation of food. But this is not where the cast-iron skillet got its start, as it has been in use since almost the beginning of the Iron Age.

When mankind first discovered the secret of steel, the ubiquitous cast-iron skillet came into use and has been with us ever since. While we may never know what type of food first graced its surface, you will likely agree that it was probably delicious.