Cast Iron

Cooking with cast-iron vessels has a long history across Asia, particularly in China, India, Korea, and Japan. In the English-speaking world, references to cast-iron cookware date back as far as the late 7th century, though metal cooking vessels of other kinds existed even earlier. In Europe, Abraham Darby I patented a method for casting thin-walled Dutch ovens -- legged cooking pots used over an open fire -- in 1708, a development that helped make cast-iron cookware more widely affordable.

Cast-iron pans and pots became especially common in Western households once cooking moved from open hearths to enclosed stoves in the mid-19th century, and major American foundries such as Griswold (founded 1865) and Wagner (founded 1891) built large followings during that era. Cast iron's popularity in American kitchens peaked in the first half of the 20th century before declining in the 1960s and 1970s as Teflon-coated aluminum cookware became widely available.

Lodge, one of the best-known cast-iron cookware brands in the United States, was founded in 1896 in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, by Joseph Lodge, initially operating as the Blacklock Foundry. After a fire destroyed the original foundry in 1910, Joseph Lodge rebuilt it and renamed the company Lodge Manufacturing.

In 2002, Lodge became the first cast-iron cookware manufacturer to pre-season its products at the foundry before sale, rather than shipping bare, unseasoned iron for the buyer to season at home -- a shift that changed how most new cast-iron cookware is sold and used today.

Stripping relies on a different reaction than seasoning does. Sodium hydroxide (lye) is a strong base that reacts with the fats and oils in old, carbonized seasoning through saponification -- the same reaction that turns fat into soap -- breaking the bonds that hold the polymerized oil together so it lifts off the iron. This is why a lye bath, rather than scrubbing or heat alone, is effective on seasoning that has become sticky, uneven, or contaminated with rust.

Electrolysis, the alternative method mentioned in many care guides, works differently: it passes an electric current through a mildly alkaline solution, such as dissolved washing soda, to convert surface rust back into iron while loosening old seasoning, without the handling risks of concentrated lye.