From what I understand even the old stuff wasn’t perfectly smooth when new, just finer grained. And from my least used old ones that seems to be true.
If perfect smoothness is what your after the easiest thing is to just get carbon steel. Shits stamped rather than molded.
Some of my relatives still use cast iron for all their cooking. One of them, an aunt, told me a story about loaning some of her cast iron cookware to a neighbor who was planning a party for some of her relatives. The neighbor later returned the cookware SCRUBBED CLEAN. De-seasoned… so to speak. My aunt was furious.
Yours? Great picture!
I know cast iron pans can crack/shatter if not properly made, so if they’re old they survived years of abuse.
So if yours is good then it stands the chance of becoming a heirloom, and if it breaks then oh well that was just twenty bucks.
Ebelskivers!
Round Danish pancakes with filling. Also you can use that type of pan to make takoyaki, but it’d be a little bit bigger than typical.
Cast iron is very brittle. So all cast iron can crack of break (dunno that I’d call it shattering). While too thin or poorly made CI is more prone to that, any and all cast iron can break that way. Its one of the 2 things that can actually render the pan unusable. The other being serious rust pitting. And rust increases the chance of cracking. But basically you have to drop the thing hard, onto a pretty hard surface to crack it. Or subject it to bending/torquing forces. I think most of the older cracked pieces you might run across were likely stored/crushed under something for extended periods.
I don’t think I’ve seen a piece of cast iron cook ware with a crack or piece broken out of it that wasn’t old. Architectural and decorative pieces yeah, but most of that stuff lives outside and intricate shapes are easy to break no matter what they’re made out of.
Thermal shock can crack it, too (which I’m sure you’re aware of). e.g., from putting a cold pan over too-high or uneven heat, or from not allowing a hot pan to cool enough before running cold water into it.
Here’s a couple nice photos of a pan that cracked in a big way after being placed over high heat.
It takes an awful lot of heat to do that, but it can happen. And same applied, low quality or overly thin cast iron is most at risk. Along with heavily pitted/rust damaged.
But counter to the linked article I wouldn’t go fixing a cracked cast iron pan by brazing. Brazing materials aren’t neccisarily food safe. And stoves, especially gas ones, are gonna be hot enough to at least partially melt the resulting bond. So I wouldn’t trust that any pan put back together that way is gonna be usable. Generally speaking cracked or broken cast iron is dead. Even if you can get it back into one piece its only suited for decoration afterwards.
I didn’t realize those corn shaped cornbreads were so popular, I can’t say i’ve ever had one. i love cornbread but never seen anyone cook them in one of those fancy pans.
I know, right? I almost hated to link to the article because of that part–but I liked the two pictures at the top, and following their link to reddit didn’t go straight to those pictures. Thank you for mentioning the brazing thing, and for elaborating why it’s not a good idea.
Oh wait, I hadn’t tried hard enough to find a better link, my bad–
here is the discussion of the heat-cracked pan on reddit
and here are just the two photos of it on imgur
I inherited a big, huge 15 inch antique griswold pan from my grandmother. It was coated with a thick layer of gunk, and generally unusable, so I brought it back from the dead by heating it in my charcoal grill for a bit, burning off all of the gunk. Then I coated it in a thin layer of vegetable oil and cooked it slowly in my oven, and let it cool. I did that process a couple of times more. In the end, I managed to get a good cooking surface. Unfortunately, not long after, I accidentally dropped it, and the handle shattered off. 
I worked a concession booth at Brimfield back in the early 90’s, I’m leery of going there now though. Back then, pre- ebay and Antiques Roadshow, prices were reasonable, you could find cool stuff for cheap, it was like a flea market with better quality stuff. A friend of mine went recently and confirmed what I was expecting: prices are through the roof.
Looks like an aebleskiver pan. It’s a little baked doughball thing. I scored one of those at Goodwill last year for next to nothing, but haven’t used it yet.
In my biz we had these small decorative-ish CI ramekin sized pans, and after a while the middle would start breaking into small octagon chunks, the same way a car window does.
Rust does that to metal over time. Even if you can’t quite see said rust. Also the non-lodge cast iron decorative/serving pieces I’m used to from restaurants aren’t exactly the same cast iron. They’re significantly lighter and more brittle than the stuff meant for cooking in. Despite being the same dimensions and thickness. I’m not sure why I suspect it’s because there’s something else in the alloy besides iron and carbon to keep the price down.
And if your not cooking in these things they’re not getting that regular season coating that keeps rust and other weathering away. So it makes sense they wouldn’t last as long.
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