My husband – like many others – is obsessed with the ‘seasoning’, cleaning and pH levels of these hefty, hulking pans. Must I tolerate it?
I need some guidance on a tiny source of friction in my home life. It is this: I live with a pan man and his man pans.
You know the kind I mean: rugged, elemental pans that you need to bench 160kg to lift; apocalypse-proof pans. Cast-iron and carbon-steel cookware isn’t exclusively a male preserve – female cookery writers and chefs are enthusiastic; I have heard it described as “tradwife adjacent” – but if the Marlboro Man cooked his horse, he would do so in these. Paradoxically, man pans are as delicate as they are tough: they need to be “seasoned” (an arcane ritual), massaged with oils, protected from humidity and low-pH substances. They invite boring fanaticism (if podcasts made pans, it would be these), becoming a shorthand for a certain kind of man; in one Instagram skit, a pan fanatic castigates his bored housemates for wrecking his skillet’s seasoning, reeling off the pH of blueberries (“2.2”), jackfruit (“4.1”) and Lucky Charms (“You’d never guess it: 1”).
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