#10 MARIETTA PA Skillet

My personal collection; those pans I intend to hold onto, while very small so far is also getting quite diverse. I find great beauty in all kinds of cast iron cookware and I don't limit myself to just Griswold. Although Griswold is considered the best(more on that in a later blog), I find it rather snobbish to collect only Griswold but to each his or her own.

Wine drinkers(another snobbish group & I used to be one of them) don't usually limited themselves to just one kind of wine, they try different vineyards, different wineries, different vintages, different grape varieties and so forth. I can just hear the Griswold collector doing the same; why I have Erie pans, diamond logos, slant logos, block logos and even some small logos, I am still looking for a Selden and Griswold pan. But you haven't tried different vineyards or different wineries, you may have achieved different vintages and different grape varieties but you are still lacking.

I found this pan a #10 Marietta PA Skillet and I think it is quite lovely. It has a rather rough cast handle with a "10" on it. The casting of the cooking surface is surprisingly smooth when you consider how rough the handle looks and how rough the bottom is. The bottom reads "MARIETTA PA" at the top and "10 IN" at the bottom. I find this interesting that it is labeled 10 inch because it is nearly 13 inches at the top which is the general measuring place for a pan and it is over 11 1/2 inches at the bottom. The bottom has an inset heat ring, a large gate mark and two points on the bottom and another on the handle that are nice and round and stick out; probably risers for the casting process.

I hope you enjoy the pictures of this pan as much as I enjoy having it in my collection. It really needs to be cleaned, you know what they say the dentist has the worst teeth in town. Probably an old pan as I don't know a lot about Marietta Pa Cast Iron but another indication of age is the one pour spout which is for right handed people.

Tasty & Juicy Low Fat Hamburgers

There is always a problem with cooking low fat hamburgers; they come out dry and with very little taste! Well this recipe solves those problems, these burgers have plenty of taste and they come out juicy as well!

Tasty & Juicy Low Fat Hamburgers

1 1/4 pounds of 90% lean ground beef (that's right 90% lean)

4 ounces finely chopped fresh white button mushrooms (I suppose a 4 oz can of mushrooms can be used in a pinch)

1 teaspoon crushed garlic

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1 Tablespoon Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Much healthier fat! Not nearly as much fat as using 80% hamburger which is used for most hamburgers)

1 teaspoon refrigerated crushed red peppers   (optional but not for me)

Mix it all together will in a large bowl. Form into 5 large patties and grill in a stove top grill pan such as the one pictured from my etsy or ecrater store. I will be listing a larger grill  pan in the near future.

Serve with your favorite condiments on a multigrain or whole wheat bun.

Suggestions for toppings: cheese, sprouts, onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles, relish, muffuletta or anything else you can think of.

Griswold #26 Vienna Roll Pan - Pattern #958

This is a new addition to my collection a Griswold #26 Vienna Roll Pan Pattern #958. These pans were produced from the 1920's to the 1940's. This pan is variation 1 with a rarity of 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. There are only 2 variations of the #26 pan and they both have a book value of $175 to $225 but the #26 is the same as the #6 Vienna Roll Pan. The #6 Vienna Roll Pan has 6 variations with the values ranging from a low of $75 for variation 2 up to $300 for variation 6. The #6 pans were produced from the 1880's to the 1910's and it appears as if the number was changed from 6 to 26 so that it wouldn't be confused with the #6 Gem Pan. The #26 pan is considered somewhat common and rather easy to obtain. The size of the pan is 12 3/8 x 6 3/4 x 1 but it is fairly light at just under 3 pounds. Hope you enjoy looking at this great pan.

Why Older Cast Iron Cookware?

Why use older cast iron cookware? Why not use new cast iron cookware? Isn't newer cast iron better than the old stuff? Shouldn't the older cast iron cookware just be collected and used for decorations?

Older cast iron cookware is better than the new modern stuff. The older cast iron such as Griswold, Wagner Ware, Favorite Piqua, Wapak and many others was cast smoother than the newer cast iron. The smoother casting is a result of using a higher grade iron ore than is available today. The older pieces were cast by hand not machine which resulted in finer casting because a finer grain sand can be used in molds when hand casting versus machine casting.

The older cast iron cookware is actually lighter than the modern cast iron cookware which would seem to be counter intuitive. An example of the lighter older cast iron is a #10 Griswold slant logo skillet versus a #10 Lodge skillet both of which I have available to weigh. The Griswold weighs in at 4 1/4 pounds versus the Lodge weighing 7 1/2 pounds, quite a significant difference! The side wall is approximately 1/8 of an inch thick on the Griswold versus approximately 3/16 of an inch thick on the Lodge. I wish I could find my micrometer.

If you look at the two pans you can see that the Lodge is noticeably rougher. This roughness translates into the cast iron not being able to hold its seasoning as well and not being as nonstick as the much smoother Griswold. Lodge stopped finishing (making them smooth) their pans in the 90's in order to compete with foreign competitors.

As for collecting old cast iron and not using it, I'm for whatever you might want to do. If it is your personal preference not to use the older cast iron and just stick it up on your wall so be it. They make wonderful decorations but they were meant to be used and cooked with. I currently have one Griswold skillet that I use and one Wagner Ware which I will feature in another post.

Most of the cast iron I use everyday is actually Lodge (see earlier post Why Cast Iron Cookware?). I was given a Lodge loaf pan that I love and as a present I was given a Lodge long handled wok. Woks were not make by the other manufacturers and this wok and the loaf pan while not terribly old are much smoother than the current Lodge pans.

This is the Griswold Slant Logo and it is for sale in my store at Etsy. Although photographed smaller you can still see that it is nice and smooth!

This is the Lodge pan from 2002 and you can plainly see that it is much rougher than the Griswold pan.

Why are Lids - Covers - Toppers so expensive?

This is a #5 Wagner Ware skillet with matching lid. The underside looks the same as the underside of the Wagner Ware dutch oven below.

Why are lids so expensive? The answers are obvious if you think about it. Not all skillets came with lids. In fact most skillets didn't come with a lid. Over the years as the available lids have become broken; the handle on top of the lid is the weak spot if the lid is dropped, the price of the remaining lids have increased in value. Most times the lids are worth more than the skillet.

I have seen on ebay where sellers separate the lid from the skillet and list both separately. I feel that separating a lid from the skillet and selling them separately is a crime; not a crime that they should be arrested for but just a crime against sensibility. The reason they separate the lid from the skillet and sell them separately is that the lid is worth more by itself than when it is sold with the skillet. Does the lid being worth more by itself than with the skillet make sense; no not at all.

I am always on the lookout for lids. I have a few on my list to complete items that I own and would like to put up for sale. What I have fought doing but is done by a number of top sellers on ebay and elsewhere is sticking any old lid on a chicken fryer or dutch oven and selling it for enormous amounts of money! The temptation is great to sell skillets and dutch ovens with mismatched lids but my conscience wouldn't allow it.

The most common mismatched item is a dutch oven because a dutch oven isn't much good if it doesn't have a lid. Commonly what you see for sale on ebay by top sellers is a Griswold or Wagner dutch oven matched up with a Lodge lid. Why? Again Griswold and Wagner are worth much more money than the Lodge and Lodge lids are readily available (because they are still manufactured and Lodge doesn't put their name on their lids) where Griswold and Wagner lids are not readily available.

These sellers then turn a virtually worthless piece of old cast iron into a valuable piece of cast iron but not really. These unscrupulous sellers then sell to unknowledgeable or uneducated buyers. These poor uneducated buyers then think they have bought an original Griswold or Wagner when in fact they have been duped into buying something worth a lot less than they paid for it. To identify a Lodge lid look at the underside and see the drip points which are called nipples (see earlier post Why Cast Iron?) and much older Lodge or another manufacturer Birmingham Stove and Range (BSR) have inverted nipples.

Below see some items for sale in my store that have lids that actually match the skillet or dutch oven!

This is an unmarked Wagner Ware dutch oven with a Pyrex lid - this is the correct lid for this dutch oven.

This is a Wagner Ware dutch oven with matching lid and a view of the underside of the lid.

This is a Griswold Iron Mountain #8 skillet (deep skillet) with matching lid and a view of the underside of the lid.