A cast iron pan is the only piece of cookware that improves by being neglected, provided the neglect is of the right kind. It does not want to be scrubbed or rushed. It wants to be heated slowly, used heavily, and wiped while warm.
Our contributor kept a ledger of a single pan for one month: what it cooked, how it was cleaned, what it complained about. The complaints were always the same — too high a flame, too impatient a hand.
The pan's final lesson arrived on day twenty-six, over onions that took forty minutes to turn the color of amber. Nothing else in the kitchen had required that much of us. Nothing else gave back as much.