Linstrum
03-20-2008, 07:01 AM
Most of my kitchen implements are pretty old, some of them are over 100 years old and work same as new.
The reason why I have a large collection of old cast iron pans and other kitchen stuff is because when I'm at garage sales, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, and other second hand stores, I look for both the unusual as well as the highly useful in kitchen tools and wares, like the corn bread pans with the dough pockets that are in the shape of ears of corn - actually not all that rare in some places and a favorite for casting lead ingots for some folks. I prefer an old cheap stamped sheet metal muffin tin for making lead "biscuits" and use my cast iron ear of corn pan for casting corn bread "ingots" to go with my chili beans.
I discovered many, many years ago that under a really ugly, disgusting black coat of caked-on grease and burned-on food that a perfectly good cast iron pan “lives” quite nicely beneath all that yucky exterior. Rejuvenating a cast iron pan is done easily using one of several methods as have already been described elsewhere on this board, such as by heating in a wood fire and then letting cool very slowly by itself to prevent cracking. Seasoning the rejuvenated pan with lard or various vegetable oils has also been described elsewhere in another recent thread.
Being Scandinavian, I have a collection of aebleskiver pans for making the traditional ball-shaped Danish-style aebleskiver, best described as ball-shaped pancakes. I don't have any photos handy of my cast iron aebleskiver pans, but they simply have seven tennis ball size hemispherical pockets arranged six around the outside with the seventh in the center. I have one aebleskiver pan with beautiful heart-shaped pockets for holiday aebleskiver. To see what they look like go to:
http://www.aebleskiver.com/Ordering1.htm (http://www.aebleskiver.com/Ordering1.htm)
Be forewarned that this is a commercial website for selling aebleskiver pans, supplies, and ingredients. It is run by a passing acquaintance of mine, Arne Hansen, a popular Danish restaurant owner in the quaint little Danish-American town of Solvang, California. Outside of Minnesota and The Dakotas, Arne is probably the main purveyor of aebleskiver pans in the United States.
I also collect turn of the last century hand cranked type cast iron meat and sausage grinders, and 1930s era cheese and vegetable slicers such as the various models of Bromwell’s Grater-Slicer. I have found that nearly all the modern electric food grinders, mixers, "food processors", and other costly kitchen machines that break down after about one year are no better than the cast iron hand crank kitchen machines and hand operated vegetable slicers that my great grandparents were using over 100 years ago. The only two electric items that are improvements over the hand crank machines are the 1930s-era Hamilton Beach electric cake mixer my mother got as a wedding gift, and my 1950s-era Oster blender, since some items like light, tender, moist cakes and vegetable-based custard pies like pumpkin are not easy to prepare from scratch without them. A modern hand crank machine I like a lot is a commercial quality Chef brand bacon and lunch meat slicing machine, it does short work of turning de-boned cooked hams, roasts, poultry breast, etc, into thin sliced delicatessen-style sandwich meat. I have made A LOT of jerky from raw beef with it, too!
Although not a kitchen item, I even still use my grandmother's 9"x12" four-sided folding slate board that she began learning her ABCs and 123s on back in 1902 when she was in the 1st grade in the one room school house at Moran Prairie (just outside Spokane), Washington State. They didn't need to buy a lot of paper back then or have computers to do homework or to learn the BASICS in class, and those were the very same folks who built the atom bomb and got us to the moon! Says a lot right there about the worth of “old-fashioned” methods and equipment.
A funny story about my school teacher grandmother who taught me to read and write, while I was learning she would not allow me to use an eraser when I made spelling mistakes, she told me just to not make mistakes to begin with! She said that when she was a little girl in school back in 1902 that they didn’t give them pencils with erasers. I agreed, quite true! But besides paper they used a chalk board to practice on, as well, and that DID have an eraser! She passed away quietly not too terribly long ago in 1996, at age 100. Bless the good people of her age group, they got us antibiotics and other wonder drugs, tractors for efficient agriculture to feed us well; inexpensive radio, TV, hi-fidelity recorded music, and movies for our enjoyment, efficient cheap automobiles, long distance rapid travel for the masses by aircraft, and on and on with their inventions and improvements of the Golden Age they created WITHOUT computers, Xerox machines, or pocket calculators.
The reason why I have a large collection of old cast iron pans and other kitchen stuff is because when I'm at garage sales, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, and other second hand stores, I look for both the unusual as well as the highly useful in kitchen tools and wares, like the corn bread pans with the dough pockets that are in the shape of ears of corn - actually not all that rare in some places and a favorite for casting lead ingots for some folks. I prefer an old cheap stamped sheet metal muffin tin for making lead "biscuits" and use my cast iron ear of corn pan for casting corn bread "ingots" to go with my chili beans.
I discovered many, many years ago that under a really ugly, disgusting black coat of caked-on grease and burned-on food that a perfectly good cast iron pan “lives” quite nicely beneath all that yucky exterior. Rejuvenating a cast iron pan is done easily using one of several methods as have already been described elsewhere on this board, such as by heating in a wood fire and then letting cool very slowly by itself to prevent cracking. Seasoning the rejuvenated pan with lard or various vegetable oils has also been described elsewhere in another recent thread.
Being Scandinavian, I have a collection of aebleskiver pans for making the traditional ball-shaped Danish-style aebleskiver, best described as ball-shaped pancakes. I don't have any photos handy of my cast iron aebleskiver pans, but they simply have seven tennis ball size hemispherical pockets arranged six around the outside with the seventh in the center. I have one aebleskiver pan with beautiful heart-shaped pockets for holiday aebleskiver. To see what they look like go to:
http://www.aebleskiver.com/Ordering1.htm (http://www.aebleskiver.com/Ordering1.htm)
Be forewarned that this is a commercial website for selling aebleskiver pans, supplies, and ingredients. It is run by a passing acquaintance of mine, Arne Hansen, a popular Danish restaurant owner in the quaint little Danish-American town of Solvang, California. Outside of Minnesota and The Dakotas, Arne is probably the main purveyor of aebleskiver pans in the United States.
I also collect turn of the last century hand cranked type cast iron meat and sausage grinders, and 1930s era cheese and vegetable slicers such as the various models of Bromwell’s Grater-Slicer. I have found that nearly all the modern electric food grinders, mixers, "food processors", and other costly kitchen machines that break down after about one year are no better than the cast iron hand crank kitchen machines and hand operated vegetable slicers that my great grandparents were using over 100 years ago. The only two electric items that are improvements over the hand crank machines are the 1930s-era Hamilton Beach electric cake mixer my mother got as a wedding gift, and my 1950s-era Oster blender, since some items like light, tender, moist cakes and vegetable-based custard pies like pumpkin are not easy to prepare from scratch without them. A modern hand crank machine I like a lot is a commercial quality Chef brand bacon and lunch meat slicing machine, it does short work of turning de-boned cooked hams, roasts, poultry breast, etc, into thin sliced delicatessen-style sandwich meat. I have made A LOT of jerky from raw beef with it, too!
Although not a kitchen item, I even still use my grandmother's 9"x12" four-sided folding slate board that she began learning her ABCs and 123s on back in 1902 when she was in the 1st grade in the one room school house at Moran Prairie (just outside Spokane), Washington State. They didn't need to buy a lot of paper back then or have computers to do homework or to learn the BASICS in class, and those were the very same folks who built the atom bomb and got us to the moon! Says a lot right there about the worth of “old-fashioned” methods and equipment.
A funny story about my school teacher grandmother who taught me to read and write, while I was learning she would not allow me to use an eraser when I made spelling mistakes, she told me just to not make mistakes to begin with! She said that when she was a little girl in school back in 1902 that they didn’t give them pencils with erasers. I agreed, quite true! But besides paper they used a chalk board to practice on, as well, and that DID have an eraser! She passed away quietly not too terribly long ago in 1996, at age 100. Bless the good people of her age group, they got us antibiotics and other wonder drugs, tractors for efficient agriculture to feed us well; inexpensive radio, TV, hi-fidelity recorded music, and movies for our enjoyment, efficient cheap automobiles, long distance rapid travel for the masses by aircraft, and on and on with their inventions and improvements of the Golden Age they created WITHOUT computers, Xerox machines, or pocket calculators.