#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.