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| Can you tell which one is the older pot? |
In case you are wondering why there have been so few posts, and what I have been doing with my life, the answer is I have once again succumbed to my long-standing pot addiction. Instead of getting out there and being 'the Firstest with the Mostest' I have been quietly at home, cruising for pots on the internet.
My addiction started a long time ago in the US, when I had to cook with some very sub-standard cooking equipment, and saw some likely Le Creuset saucepans on sale..... Those pots were one of the few things I took with me when I finally left the conjugal home. Though dirt poor, I supplemented them over time with three cast iron baking forms from Cousances (be still, my beating heart), a Dutch oven, and even - oh the extravagance of irresponsible youth! - a turkey roasting pan. Alas I allowed myself to be persuaded by my mother to leave them all behind when I left Oregon, she claimed shipping would be too exorbitant. Had I known then how expensive such pots are in Europe I would have ignored her advice, but I was still young and foolish and gullible.
I did keep the three baking forms, and when they finally arrived - I had shipped all my belongings in a small crate from Oregon to Germany - my mother cast one look at them and took them for her own, claiming that I wouldn't need them as a student. But she held on to them like a conscientious leech long after I ceased being a student, and I only got them back after she had died, when I spirited them out of the house before my father discovered their virtues. He had never baked a cake in his life, as far as I knew, but I wasn't going to take any chances! Because cast iron baking forms are the best in the world, and are rarely made anymore. I paid $10 each for those forms 34 years ago, and they are still giving sterling service.
Once in England I lived in just one rented room for a dozen years, paying off my student loans, sharing kitchens and bathrooms, but nevertheless started to amass another collection of Le Creuset cast iron pots soon after my arrival. When I bought my own house my fate was sealed, because having my own kitchen, and thus lots - comparatively - space for pots & pans, my pot addiction exploded onto the stage of Ebay with a vengeance.
It ebbed and flowed, depending on what else I had to attend to and what new information filtered into my addled brain. Some time ago it was additional baking forms - a post in itself, then Griswold pans and miscellaneous pancake makers - another post should there be any interest, or even if there isn't.
My current junkie episode was sparked a few months ago when I stayed in bed for a few days with a cold. My body was ill, but my brain remained active. Casting about for something to entertain itself with, it soon began to muse about the defects and deficits of my stove. There are basically two:
(1) I have gas rings, which means that if you put a pot onto the hob the part that is immediately above the flame will get hotter than the rest of the pot. Indeed, depending on the size of the pot, it is quite possible for the edges to be almost cold, while the centre is burning the food. This has to do with the conductivity of the pot-metal; iron keeps heat well, but only after it is thoroughly hot. If you want an evenly hot cast iron pot, you must put it in the oven. Cast iron pots were designed to be used on an old style stove, which had one large cooking surface above a fire; they don't work so well on modern stoves with their little burners.
(2) My burners are very ambitious, anxious to give good service. No matter how low I turn the flame, the contents of my pot will still bubble lustily. This is OK if I want to quickly boil up some vegetables of fry steak, but if I want to make stock this is a disaster! To make stock I throw an assortment of bones and cheap meats into a pot, add water, and then let the lot simmer for six to ten hours. Simmer - not boil lustily! Even a huge pot on a tiny flame does this on my super-efficient stove top.
I tossed and turned on my bed of pain, torturing my brain for a solution to the problem, until a thought popped into my head, unexpected and unbidden: COPPER!!!
Copper is a great conductor, which is why some people use copper bottom pots. I don't like these pots, because they are expensive and lined in tin, which wears off after a while, and re-tinning them is also expensive. Using copper pots without tin is likely to result in the development of verdigris, which is highly toxic. However, if one were to put a copper plate onto the burner, and the pot onto the copper plate, one would have all the advantages of copper and none of the drawbacks.
Moreover, one could increase the cooking surface of one's stove! If you put a large copper plate on to a burner, it will become evenly hot, so if you then put a ten inch pot on top of it the pot will also become evenly hot.
Which brings us to the oval pots I recently discovered! Oval casseroles are strictly for the oven, because it is impossible to properly cook in them on modern stoves. Modern stoves have round burners, and if you put an oval casserole on them the two sides on the long end of the pot will not get hot. Eventually this will ruin the pot, too. However, with a copperplate you can extend the cooking surface so that the entire bottom of the oval casserole is in contact with heat.
Oval casseroles are useful for braising birds and roasts, because ideally a pot should fit around a roast snugly - if you cook them in round pots there will be lots of space between the pot and the roast, and it won't cook so well. So with an extended surface, courtesy of a copper plate, I can first fry a roast on all sides, and then put it into the oven for a slow finishing off.
BUT .... where was I going to get my copper plate from? I googled around and look what I found!
Someone else had had the same idea, and since it was a engineer with a bit of get-up-and-go he actually produced the plates: Bella Copper in California! If you are interested, see link below; but keep in mind that copper is very heavy!
http://bellacopper.stores.yahoo.net/
I bought several copper plates from them, and they work very well, both to increase my cooking surface and as a diffuser for slow cooking. They are also supposed to defrost very well, but I haven't tried that yet.
So now I needed to buy oval casseroles!
Are you still with me?
Since I wanted them for frying and roasting I wanted naked iron, not enameled, pots. These are hard to come by these days, so I started to haunt Ebay for them. I bought two from about 1910, and two from the 1960s or so. They are all different sizes, for different size roasts.
Once I had all my pots, I assembled them on a kitchen surface to admire and adore them, and noticed that they are rather different. The old ones are long, narrow, and shallow, whereas the more recent one are more oval, and much deeper. Why might this be?
I googled around but the truth was not found! So here is my theory (you'd expect nothing less!).
These casseroles are made for roasting birds. Before the war chicken and turkey was expensive; people ate mainly ducks and geese. Ducks and geese are long narrow birds; chicken and turkeys are less long, but plumper and more compact. Therefore I believe the different shape casseroles simply reflect the type of bird they were made to accommodate.
I do hope my biggest casserole can fit a goose; I am NOT- so NOT!!!! buying the Goose Roaster from Le Creuset. It is so heavy I could barely lift it even empty, and probably it wouldn't fit into my oven. Also it costs a small fortune. You can bathe a baby in it, apparently. I am having these fantasies, of building a temporary fire-pit in the garden, so I can roast a massif goose inside this massif pot .....
I should probably go Cold Turkey, but I would have to cook it first, and I am really not sure it would fit into my large Goose Casserole, so probably I would have to buy another casserole to fit the turkey in....
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| Two large Cousances oval roasting casseroles from the 1960s or 70s |
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| Same length different shapes |
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| Same length different shapes |
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| Isn't this little roaster the cutest thing? Great for roasting Asparagus! |
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| Large oval casserole on small stove |
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| On a ten inch copper plate - result! |
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| Two copperplates if you have a really big pot, or want to have more than two pots on two burners; the left one is pretty unused, the right one has seen action; they cleanup well if you can be bothered |
