I’m guessing it was dropped in just the right (wrong) way and cracked
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I bought a couple of pans to renovate. After I’d cleaned off the rusty crud I noticed one had a hairline crack in the sidewall. It still held water, so I hoped that multiple seasonings would fill it. Sold it informing of the imperfection but it came back the next day. After sufficient heat a loud bang caused the crack to reveal itself on first use tossing the cooking seeds across the floor. Not a good result.
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They’ll crack if you drop them. Handles dropping off is common, but cracks across the bottom are as well.
And once rusted enough they seem pretty susceptible to cracking from the heat. Cracks are common enough in rusted pans that checking for cracks is a thing when buying vintage and a step in restoring pans. So I think there’s a whole moisture in pits expanding to cause cracks, or rust propagating through as a hairline fracture thing going on.
I don’t think it is. A lot of the cracks I’ve seen start from the logos molded into the bottom, or the corners where the bottom transitions into the side wall. Those are all sharp angles, and apparently with metal sharp angles are where fracturing starts.
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I’ve got a few stiff spatulas for appropriate uses, one of which is pretty heavy too, but they’re all still a hell of lot thinner and lighter than a cast iron pan. I can see some circumstances where you could use a cast iron pan spatula, but it would be thick, heavy and conductive enough that it would be inferior to an actual spatula for every conceivable use, it seems to me.
I’ve never been one for single-purpose kitchen gadgets myself, especially when a general-purpose tool will do the same thing just as well…
I’ve seen broken cast iron recycled into wootz damascus due to the relatively high carbon content and relatively low melting point. All you need is some vanadium containing alloy, some flux, a nice big crucible, and a small foundry/furnace!
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I was also interested in the bright finish on the pan, and it is indeed cast iron, but it’s plated in chrome. Griswold and other manufacturers did this when people wanted all the benefits of cast iron without its rustic appearance.
Plated Finish Ware - The Cast Iron Collector: Information for The Vintage Cookware Enthusiast
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Shoulda been a knife
I disagree with this completely (but different strokes for different folks).
I have exactly three things in my kitchen that I truly love, and use every single day: My 12-inch cheap Lodge cast iron pan, my $200 Shun chef’s knife, and my $10 Dexter Russell short metal spatula.
None of them are unreplaceable, none of them the top-of-the-line (though the Shun is very nice), but I use them so much they are an extension of my body.
Anyway, point being, the metal spatula goes great with the cast iron pan, and I think the scraping even helps keep the nearly-mirror smooth finish on it. And it works fine on my All-Clad as well, I doubt the steel of the one can nick the steel of the other. Naturally I wouldn’t use it on my small non-stick I occasionally use for omelettes, but for everything else it’s a combination stirrer/flipper/surgeon’s knife/ninja weapon compared with the big, clumsy oafs that are my plastic and wooden tools.
What role does the tiny hole in the middle of the french toast play?
Quail egg?
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My grandfather left me his cast iron frying pans, some of which go back to his father’s father, but one of them arrived cracked. According to Mom, that particular pan’s history included weekly community fish-frys for several decades, as well as daily cooking. Given that the bottom of the pan was visibly curved I’m guessing that it just had too many heat cycles and fatigued out (metal recrystalization), with the crack running right along the middle of the bottom of the pan.
So, what to do with this piece of multi-generational cast iron cookware? Well, I’m a blacksmith and knifemaker hobbyist, so I made a set of knives.
Now, cast iron is 4% carbon by weight; good steel is somewhere around 1% (actually anything from about .5% to 2% will work, but 1% is just about ideal), and I have a casting furnace and oil-bonded casting sand. Cue a montage (that I now wish I had recorded) of figuring out how much low-carbon steel (1020) was needed to dilute it to 1%, breaking up the pan the rest of the way and charging a crucible with the iron and steel, melting it, and pouring some ingots. I’d never worked with molten steel before, so it was quite the learning experience (and I now have a thin layer of steel coating the bottom of my crucible furnace, when the crucible broke during the final pour.) I also ended up grinding off all the visible slag and sand inclusions, cutting off the ends, and otherwise cleaning up the castings.
In the end I ended up with about 3lbs of useable steel, which I forged and ground into some chef knives. The knives went out as xmas gifts to several other decendants of Grandpa Herb, except of course for the one I kept for myself. Still have it, though it needs some serious restoration work (the edge has chips and nicks after 30 years of regular use).
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My spouse thought it was “Magnalite”, the aluminum cookware that I just learned came after nickel plated cast iron. Thank you for the reply and the link.
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Aaaaaa please don’t give me cravings…
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