Typically made from absorbent, finely woven soft linen, tea towels were ideal for drying china, glassware and delicate serving pieces without fear of scratching or leaving a lint residue.

During the Great Depression in the United States, hard-earned cash was needed for necessities like food and shelter. Americans diligently sought to make use of everything. For the housewife, this meant re-using and re-purposing whatever she could find for her family.

Enter the feed or flour sack. The cloth bags that contained animal feed, flours or grains were made from coarse cotton, and while they didn’t look too dainty at first, they were readily available and absorbent. Cut into a suitable size and hemmed, resourceful women would borrow the English style of embroidering the pieces to make them look more feminine and decorative. Industry eventually caught on and sellers would commission artists and designers to spruce up the sacks, thereby increasing sales to keen-eyed women who were just as interested in the sack as what was inside it.

Today, the tea towel has evolved into what most of us call dishtowels and can be found adorning refrigerator and oven door handles in kitchens across America.

By using and re-using a cloth towel, you’re also doing your part to protect the environment.

EllynAnne Geisel, author of The Kitchen Linens Book: Using, Sharing, and Cherishing the Fabrics of Our Daily Lives, credits her mother-in-law with first igniting her interest in kitchen linens.

“More to the point,” she stresses, “it was her daily use of her linens that influenced how I enjoy my own collection.”

“And with my environmental awareness heightened, I’m practicing a less wasteful lifestyle by replacing paper goods with those of vintage cloth.”

According to Care2, a social action network devoted to people who want to lead a sustainable and socially responsible lifestyle, paper accounts for one-third of municipal landfill waste. Replacing paper with cloth wherever we can is, in fact, more eco-friendly. Electric dryers are actually twice as energy-efficient as the manufacture of paper towels, according to the Care2 website. When you take into account the millions of trees used to make napkins and the chemicals used to bleach the pulp, why not use cloth? Even though a cloth dishtowel may go through a similar process, it gets used over and over rather than making a quick trip to the landfill.

Better yet, choose towels that are made with a combination of hemp or linen, both of which are more sustainable then pure cotton. And yes, organic cotton is vastly different from conventional cotton because it won’t contain the same pesticide residue.

Photograph of American grown Organic cotton courtesy of Earth-Ware

For Wrapping: A gorgeous tea towel as giftwrap? Imagine a gift basket of gourmet coffees, biscotti and a French press wrapped tidily in a beautiful towel featuring a 1901 patent sketch of an automatic fountain percolator coffee pot.

For Guests: Printed with creative designs, tea towels can easily find their place in a guest bathroom as an inventive way to showcase your personality or that of your guest. A towel printed with a vintage corkscrew, for example, is a thoughtful way to honor a guest who happens to be a wine enthusiast.

For the Kitchen: Sure, kitchen-themed towels make perfect sense to dry a pot, but consider cleverly designed towels such as a cleaver and knife or a whisk as cloth napkins for your next dinner party.

As a chef, I like anything that has more than one use in the kitchen. Dishtowels are the original multi-purpose wipe, with more beautiful designs available than ever before to turn this kitchen workhorse into a bonafide linen you’ll be proud to use.

Scullery Soap	The Tea Towel Set	Hudson Made Bandana

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. http://www.perfectpairnyc.com

Cooking an exceptional meal or dish need not be a complex science; you simply need a good set of tools. (Image source: Shorpy)

This gizmo culture isn’t new, of course. The 1950s might be considered the Internet boom of kitchen convenience products as well as convenience foods. The swingin’ ’70s gave us other things as our mamas brought home the bacon and cooked it up in a pan. According to Richard Snodgrass in his new book, Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm-Kitchen Recipes, adopting convenience products — be they food or funky gadgets for the kitchen — can be an indication of wealth and status.

“A curious thing happened as technology worked its way into every aspect of our everyday lives and processed food became more prevalent: people started to prefer the prepared and packaged food to fresh. And it wasn’t all just for the convenience,” Snodgrass writes. “For Americans at least, it became a mark of being modern and up-to-date — and more than that, too: it became an indication of affluence and success — to open a can of peas or tomatoes or asparagus rather than deal with vegetables right from the ground.”

1964. The Super Giant supermarket in Rockville, Maryland. Color transparency by John Dominis, Life magazine photo archive. (Source: Shorpy)

This same thinking is what gave us kitchen inventions (and I use that term loosely) like the Fox Run Butter Spreader or the particularly interesting Peter Petrie Egg Separator . Thankfully, there seems to be a renewed appreciation for traditional kitchen tools that work and also embody the traditions of American craftsmanship.

Jacob Bromwell is a classic example. This kitchen-goods company has been doing the same basic thing really, really well for a very long time.

The Pie Safe from Jacob Bromwell is perfect for storing pies, sweets, breads, and other baked goods.

Established in 1819 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacob Bromwell is the oldest kitchenwares manufacturer, marketer and retailer in the United States. Today, Jacob Bromwell’s specialty products retain that rustic sensibility and high quality the company earned on America’s frontier. Among its patented products are the flour sifters and popcorn poppers you’ve probably seen in your grandmother’s kitchen. All its products, which are made in the U.S.A., are non-electric and have no moving parts. And, to prove that if something ain’t broke, there’s no need to fix it, Jacob Bromwell still uses the same authentic materials it started with nearly 200 years ago, such as tin, stainless steal, aluminum and copper.

Photo Credit : Sharokh Mirzai

Have a look at the classic “food processor” by Jacob Bromwell. Similar to a chinois, this tool can do the job of dozens of kitchen aids.

Just think: You’ve boiled potatoes to make pommes purée (a more luxurious phrase for mashed potatoes). You can hold the strainer over the sink and pour the potatoes in to let them drain. Then, give the potato pan a rinse, add milk or cream and butter to warm. Take your drained potatoes in the strainer to a 9×13 pan and start scraping. The wooden pestle makes quick work of the potatoes, which can then be stirred quickly into the warmed cream for luscious, rich potatoes. A strainer, drainer and processor? And it cleans easily? Meets my definition of a handy gadget.

Lisa McManus, senior editor in charge of equipment testing at Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines and the Gadget Guru on America’s Test Kitchen TV, is a terrific no-nonsense resource about kitchen tools.

“I hate spending money on something that doesn’t work,” McManus said in an online interview. “I’m so cheap. If I buy it, … and then every time I open the drawer and that thing is in there, I’m mad again. I take it very personally when stuff doesn’t work. Most of the time you don’t need all this extra stuff. You just need a few things.”

For McManus, the key to anything in the kitchen is its usefulness. She counts among her favorite things her OXO tongs and not surprisingly, her 12-inch Lodge cast iron skillet

“It really has to earn its place if I am going to buy it or recommend it,” she says. “It HAS to be something you need.”

And something that works.

Old-Fashioned Gourmet Food Processor	Flour Sifter	Vintage Style Coffee Pot

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com

Brooklyn Roasting Company’s DUMBO storefront. Image Source: Flickr

Called the “Hardest Working Cup” by Off Track Planet in its highlights of New York’s 10 Best Cafés in 2013, Brooklyn Roasting (BRC) is an ongoing journey that began with a simple love of coffee.

Founded in late 2010 by Jim Munson and a team of talented co-owners, BRC has already become become a landmark coffee shop in Brooklyn’s hip DUMBO neighborhood and earlier this year introduced a new outpost near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Walking toward Brooklyn Roasting on an otherwise blithe Tuesday mid-morning on cobblestoned Jay Street heading toward the East River, you’ll discover a steady stream of DUMBO professionals spawned by the area’s high-tech boomlet and stroller-steering moms and dads. Upon entering the industrial chic shop, my nose, surprisingly, is not the first sense to kick in. My eyes perk first upon seeing the Loring Kestrel coffee roaster and burlap bags of coffee beans on pallets, each awaiting their turn. The industrial gurbling from the roaster and the various coffee machines expertly manned at the counter competed valiantly with the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” for aural attention. Only then does the telltale smell of brewing coffee register. The shabby- chic décor sweeps me in, alongside old-fashioned counters, aged floors, exposed ceilings and doughnuts that enticingly beckon.

Brooklyn Roasting Company’s co-founder and chief roaster Michael Pollack. Photo: Blaise Haywood

When I ask to see co-owner and chief roaster Michael Pollack, I am directed to a sitting area in a far corner. On a plush-but-worn orange couch on one side of a huge coffee table made from a re-purposed factory door, there sits Jim Munson and Michael Pollack, engaged in a polite conversation with a third man. After a few minutes of exceedingly earnest conversation and my steady presence, the third fellow leaves after exchanging business cards. I apologize for intruding but am reassured that they were only doing what they do best: Keeping the doors open to new opportunities.

“Who knows?” Pollack says, referring to the departed candidate. “That guy wanted to talk about a BRC salad dressing, and because we gave him the time, we might find an entirely new business line.”

The journey to this popular startup coffee enterprise officially began for Jim and Michael and their other partners three years ago, when, at age 59, Michael responded to Munson’s “Help Wanted” ad looking for a coffee intern. After a successful business career, Pollack had found a passion for home-roasting his own coffee beans in the late 1990s after his first foray into buying beans on the then-fledgling Internet.

“I had bought this sample package of nine different kinds of coffee from all around the world, and when the first package came, there were raw beans inside,” Pollack says. “I would rather do without than compromise if there’s a way to get what I think is the best experience, so I taught myself how to roast the coffee beans to get truly the best flavor.”

A budding coffee plant in Ndumberi, Kenya. Image Source: Flickr

This was just as Starbucks was bringing the concept of gourmet coffee to the masses. His own passion enabled him to start a little mail-order side business supplying other early adopters, and he developed his own style of roasting and extracting the best from the beans. So three years ago, when he answered an ad to be a coffee intern, you could say lots of things on his résumé caught Munson’s eye.

“The guiding premise of everything we do here can be distilled into one word: Yes,” Pollack says. “I said yes to this opportunity, and Jim said yes to my experience.”

Three years later, BRC has 55 employees, and Pollack oversees the roasting of 10,000 pounds of coffee beans every week. Nearly all (95 percent) of the beans are certified Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance and/or Organic.

Chérmelle Edwards, a self-described uber-consumer of all things cultural, is the woman behind SMDLR, a Web magazine in photo essay and blog post form documenting indie coffee culture. She wandered in to Brooklyn Roasting  fairly soon after its opening and is still drawn to its commitment to the journey.

“The connection about consuming a drink and knowing there was someone behind it is important to us,” she says, citing author Seth Godin’s recent discussions about the shift from an industrial economy to a connection economy. “The Brooklyn Roasting space is always changing, evolving, transforming. It’s a beautiful metaphor for coffee—it’s always changing, in the field, when it matures, how it goes through this journey to your cup.”

Pollack travels the world to the beans’ countries of origin, from South America (he recently returned from Peru, to Southeast Asia and Africa. He’s passionate yet practical about the workers there and the lives they lead servicing the world’s second largest trading commodity (after oil).

A fair trade coffee plantation in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Image Source: Flickr

“Nearly all our coffee is picked by hand,” he says. “It’s unbelievable what they do to get coffee from the field to our tables, and we never want to lose sight of that. Even though coffee is traded like a commodity, making coffee is not a commodity. It’s a craft, and we respect that.”

Many of the co-operatives BRC works with benefit by getting money back on each can of beans sold to support workers on the ground. And Pollack also views BRC’s work as a calling to introduce American palates to coffee from the entire global market.

“Where else can you have the opportunity to try a coffee like Panamanian Esmeralda?” he asks, pointing at what could be the world’s most expensive coffee at $80 a pound. “For an extra 50 cents, you can try a cup of that here.”

The entrepreneurial spirit drives the entire BRC team, always making them take a meeting or listen to a business idea from one of their partners. In addition to the idea of a salad dressing (“Coffee-infused balsamic vinegar would taste really good, don’t you think?” Pollack asks), there was a limited-edition coffee liqueur made by a Red Hook distillery that he’s trying to bring back, and there’s the ongoing relationship with their dairy producer, Battenkill Valley Creamery, for its specially blended 7 percent butterfat cream/milk designed specifically for BRC.

“We tasted every milk available in the state of New York, and the sweetness of their milk went beautifully with the roast profile of our coffee,” Pollack says.

The journey continues. Pollack laughs when I ask what’s next for Brooklyn Roasting.

The Brooklyn Roasting Company offers Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and Organic certified and sustainable coffees.

“One of our employees who’s been with us since the beginning asked me a few weeks ago what Brooklyn Roasting is going to be like in two years,” Pollack says. “I have no idea. But the nice thing is that we give people we work with—our employees, our business partners, our growers, even our customers—more opportunities than they’re going to get anyplace else.”

Coffee watcher Edwards concurs.

“BRC has the ability to bring people in, to communicate a feeling about their brand that makes you want to be in their space,” she says. “I never know what I’m going to get when I go in there except for a great cup of coffee.”

Shop our complete collection of coffee roasts and other kitchen accessories here.

Bespoke Blend Coffee	Brooklyn Roasting Trio	Flame Blackened Coffee Scoop

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com

In the kitchen, nothing cooks quite like cast iron. Stainless steel, aluminum, copper, they all have their places and superior attributes for certain tasks. But for three things, in certain situations, I always turn to cast iron.

To Sear

Searing is a funny thing. The reason most of us think about why we do it is actually quite wrong.

We’re often told that searing meat causes it to retain juices. According to none other than renowned food scientist Harold McGee, meat is actually slightly more likely to lose moisture when seared first. What? (Check out McGee’s book here).

Searing using cast iron gives meat a distinctive, delicious texture.

Yup. Seems that when we sear, we are exposing meat to higher temperatures (typically higher than 350 degrees Fahrenheit), which destroys more cells and releases more liquid.

So why sear? There are three very good reasons.

First, for flavor. Browning meat creates carmelization, which tastes good. Secondly, for texture. The difference between crunchy, chewy exterior meat versus softer, tender interior meat is interesting to our palate.

And lastly, because goshdarnit, browned meat looks nice.

All the above can be said for other, non-meat products, too, which brings us back to cast iron.

Iron’s ability to consistently retain heat across the pan means that whatever’s being cooked in it will be evenly and beautifully cooked.

To sear, bring the pan to temperature over medium heat on an appropriately sized burner. Ensure the pan is fully heated before you begin cooking. Cast iron can take a long time to heat up or cool down, so you want it right before you begin, since it can be difficult to adjust quickly.

I typically sear “dry,” with no fat, to get that crispy, browned surface. (Note: a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet is essentially a non-stick pan once it has been well seasoned by baking with a light coating of oil. Click here for instructions from our friends at Cook’s Illustrated.)

Dry the food well with a paper towel, especially scallops. And remember to use a potholder or dry dish towel on the handle, since it heats up, too. As a safety measure when I’m done with a cast-iron pan, I leave a dishtowel or potholder draped over the handle (away from any hot burners) as a reminder NOT to touch it.

A Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. Image credit: Le Creuset.

To Braise

Braising involves first searing to develop color and flavor, then cooking “low and slow” in a liquid like stock or wine. This method is ideal for cooking tough meats— cuts like roast, brisket or round, as it helps break down the tough, connective tissue.

I go to my enameled cast-iron cookware for stews and hearty dishes like Boeuf Bourguignon (Julia Child’s recipe is my go-to.)

While traditional cast-iron Dutch ovens can obviously withstand the soak of cooking liquids for hours at a time, I prefer to use the enameled for long, wet cooking for one basic reason: Aesthetics. The enameled cast iron (think Le Creuset, Staub and Lodge) hold heat, go from stovetop to oven to serving, look terrific in their myriad colors and are a cinch to clean.

To Bake

Cornbread, Pineapple-Upside Cake and Tarte Tatin. These comfort-food desserts simply don’t taste as good cooked in a traditional cake pan. Trust me on this. It’s that carmelization thing, which is even more pronounced with sugar.

Baking in cast-iron produces a beautiful browning and sugar-y thickening that makes a big difference between just delicious and decadent.

Cornbread baked in cast iron pans has an edge over other cornbread: caramelization.

For cornbread, by pre-heating the skillet, you ensure a rich, brown crust all around the cornbread. The caramelization on the cake and tart is stunning, thanks to the consistent heat. And there’s something decidedly Old World about hoisting that skillet around to flip the dessert out. Those cooks of yester-year were tough.

This Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe (adapted from Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food) is a perfect example of how to use a cast-iron pan to turn out a delightful dessert. (And because I never remember to take butter out of the refrigerator in time for it to warm to the right temperature, I’ve included my own food-processor technique using cold butter.)

Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie

Ingredients:

6 T. unsalted butter, cold
1/3 c. packed brown sugar (light or dark, depending on your taste)
½ c. granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 t. vanilla extract
1 c. all-purpose flour (spooned into a measuring cup and leveled off)
½ t. baking soda
½ t. salt
1 c. chocolate chips (milk, dark, bittersweet, whatever you prefer)
1 c. unsalted nuts, toasted and chopped roughly (I use walnuts; whatever nuts you use, keep the pieces kind of large, so you can really bite into them in the finished cookie).

A completed Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie. Image credit: Sam Klein.

Instructions:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Have at the ready a 10-inch cast-iron skillet (un-greased, of course).
2. Using a food processor, combine butter and sugars until well blended. (If you’d prefer to do this by hand, the butter will need to be at room temperature.)
3. Add egg and vanilla and blend until well mixed.
4. Sprinkle flour, baking soda and salt evenly on top and blend until combined.
5. Spread the chocolate chips and nuts in the cast-iron skillet.
6. Scrape the batter into the skillet and spread it evenly around the pan with a rubber spatula. The chips and nuts will get mixed in just fine. Smooth the top.
7. Bake until the cookie is golden brown on top and just set in the center, 18-20 minutes. The residual heat from the pan will continue cooking while you let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes.
8. Cut into wedges and serve with ice cream for a delectable cookie sundae. A glass of milk goes pretty well with it, too.

Milk & Honey	The Duo	Peter Rabbit

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com

Backyard chicken keeping (an extension of the “eat local” urban farming movement to raise livestock or grow your own food to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions) is on the rise, according to Worldwatch Institute, an organization devoted to global sustainability.

In many ways, the chicken has become the mascot of the locavore movement. It’s not the first time the proud poultry has been the standard-bearer for a social shift. In 1928, the Republican National Committee’s advertisement supporting Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign touted its track record that had “reduced hours and increased earning capacity, silenced discontent and put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot.’”

1948 stamps commemorating the Centennial of the American Poultry Industry.

But why chickens? BackYard Chickens, one of the go-to online resources for chicken-ry, conducted an informal poll of its subscribers about the various reasons why they have chickens in their back yards.

Perhaps not surprisingly, 92 percent of respondents said it was for the eggs. The second-most popular answer, with 72 percent, was that they were kept for pets (making the 26 percent who said they kept chickens for food seem positively barbaric).  All those answers sound, well, really good. Low carbon footprint. Healthy. Sustainable. Fewer bugs. Natural fertilizer. Why doesn’t everyone have a chicken in their backyard?

“The biggest advantage to keeping your own chickens is that you get to control what goes in to the egg,” says Greg Anderson, program manager of Just Foods’ City Farms initiative. Just Food is the New York-based sustainable food organization committed to connecting communities and local farms with the resources they need to make fresh, locally grown food accessible to all New Yorkers. In addition to invertebrate foods like fruits and vegetables delivered via CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) programs, Just Food is also in the non-profit chicken business.

A volunteer for Just Food NYC with chickens at the Brook Park Coop in the Bronx. Image credit: Lily Kesselman.

Commercially bought chickens are typically loaded down with chicken feed that contains animal byproducts and antibiotics to keep the animals marginally healthy enough to lay large quantities of eggs. With your own chickens, Anderson says, seeing is believing.

“We get to see the chicken, so we know how healthy that chicken is, and we can work to improve the health of the chicken when necessary,” he says. “We don’t have to use antibiotics or steroids or anything because we’re feeding them fresh foods and giving them a complete diet.”

Plus, you know you’re getting fresher eggs than store-bought, which are usually already two to four weeks old by the time they get to store shelves, Anderson says.

Luckily, there are plenty of excellent sources online to help get you started if you’re interested in talking, er, chicken.

The Chicken Whisperer (also known as Andy Schneider) is a nationally known expert on chickens. His “Backyard Poultry with the Chicken Whisperer” program on blogtalkradio is worth a listen if only for the theme song, not to mention the actual content, which covers everything from chicken diseases like bumblefoot to general care and upkeep.

A Silver Laced Wyandotte, a heritage breed chicken. Image credit: Moosicorn Ranch.

For the official word, the American Poultry Association is a good place to start. The APA recognizes more than 460 varieties of chickens (at least the ones that qualify for poultry shows and awards), with exotic names that belie the simple pleasure of a barnyard bird. Names like Barred Rocks (also known as Plymouth Rock, an original American breed) and Araucanas to dark-shelled layers like Barnevelder, Empordanesa, Pendesenca or Welsummers.

There are chickens known as Sex-Links, which are bred so that males and females are different colors from chickhood. This is apparently quite helpful, since no one wants to go home with handful of innocent-looking yellow chicks and in a few weeks realize that they’ll have attitude instead of eggs.

Most chicken-lovers agree that the majority of home farmers rely on a mixed-breed mutt known as an Easter Egger. Also known as Rainbow Layers, these chickens have a blue-egg gene that means the colors of their shells span the color spectrum from blues and greens to pinks and blush.

At left, a Rhode Island Red hen (Image credit: Garrett Heath), at right a black sex link rooster (image credit: Jessica Denet).

For the first-time chicken-keeper, the most important thing to consider is why you want to keep chickens. That should spur what kind of bird you get, as the multitudes of breeds all serve different purposes. Heritage breeds, whose lineage date back prior to the mid 20^th century and are subject to strict APA guidelines, are truly gorgeous, but they aren’t necessarily bred for egg production. You may get one egg a day from a Rhode Island Red or a Leghorn (the most popular commercially used breed), but just one every other day from an “antique” bird.

The Chicken Chick gives great tips about care and specific issues like “Drop in Egg Production: Causes & Solutions” and “5 Tips to Prepare for Chicken Illness, Injury & End of Life Decisions.”

Eggs from heritage breed chickens in a multitude of colors. Image credit: Steven L. Johnson.

At some point, every chicken will stop laying eggs and become a pet… or dinner. While regulations vary depending on the area, in New York City, a backyard chicken must be slaughtered on premises. Yes, that’s right. Either the owner or someone else brought on to the property must do the deed because city policy doesn’t allow for transport of a kept bird to a slaughterhouse.

Gulp.

For Just Foods’ Greg Anderson, it’s part of the circle of life.

“We understand that the animal is something to give us life, so we have to respect that and treat the animal as well as we can during its entire lifetime,” he says, which includes a humane death.

If you’re really interested in chickens, one of the easiest ways to get started is via BackYard Chicken’s primer on going from the chicken to the egg. Or, visit one of Just Foods’ monthly chicken workshops.

“Keeping your own chickens, you know your chickens are not only healthy physically, but they’re also emotionally healthy,” Anderson says. “It’s the interacting with our food that’s the biggest plus.”

Use these products from Hudson Made when preparing your next delicious egg-based meal:

Flour Sifter	Flap Jack	The Trio

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com

Cast iron, you say? That heavy, slightly dirty-looking skillet your grandmother used? The skillets the pioneers took to the frontier? The same pan that Cowboys & Indians Magazine recently named one of its “Best of the West” icons, right there alongside the horse, the Bowie knife, and whiskey?

Like many things from the good ol’ days, cast iron is making a resurgence in today’s home and restaurant kitchens.

A postcard showing a cattle drive cook and a chuck wagon with an assortment of cast iron pots and pans. This photograph was taken in the vicinity of Liberal, Kansas, circa 1905. Image credit: Hal Reid / Kansas Historical Foundation.

The original non-stick pan, cast iron has a lot going for it: It’s cheap to buy new, easy to care for, incredibly long-lasting, and also it’s organic, not a chemical-based coating that has raised some questions about health concerns.

Something Old

Cast iron has been used for making cooking vessels since around 200 BC, during the Han Dynasty in China. Cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens became ubiquitous in hearths the world wide until other cooking vessels made of lighter-weight steel, aluminum or other newly forged metals found their way into kitchens and cooking technology changed to stovetops and conventional ovens.

In early America, cast-iron cookware was a thriving industry, and family collections of the cookware were considered important enough they were deeded in wills and handed down generation by generation.

There is currently only one U.S.-based cast iron manufacturer: Lodge (more on that to come). For many cast-iron aficionados, though, it’s go old or go home empty-handed.

Greg Stahl founded the Wagner & Griswold Society in 1994 when his self-described addiction for cast iron made prior to the 1940s and especially goods made by the venerated (and alas, now-defunct) manufacturers Wagner and Griswold.

The Griswold logo on the bottom of a mid-20th century 9-inch square skillet. Image credit: Nic McPhee.

An endowed professor at Harvard Medical School, Stahl sounds positively delighted as he describes the difference between cookware made by hand versus machine (hand-poured iron is much smoother, making it easier to season, he says).

“I have a PhD. in physiology,” says Stahl. “I research for a living, so I started doing research on these things and I was hooked. I started with three skillets and today I’ve got hundreds of cast-iron items.”

Couple that research bent with a serious interest in gourmet cooking and it’s clear why Stahl bangs the cast-iron drum.

“To me, cooking with cast iron is all about the flavor,” he says. “If I have a choice, I’ll use cast iron. I couldn’t live without my Dutch oven and my skillet.”

Blueberry muffin skillet cake. Image credit: Chiot’s Run.

With more than 400 members from near and far (including Estonia and Australia), the Wagner & Griswold Society also has a forum for members to swap tips, tricks, questions and item descriptions.

“I have a couple of pieces made in the 1800s, and you just don’t know who has cooked with that,” Stahl says. “It could have been somebody famous, one of the pioneers. One of the amazing things about an antique skillet is that this piece is never going to be made again. It’s history.”

Something New

Opened in 1896 by Joseph Lodge in South Pittsburg, Tenn., Lodge is run by Joseph’s great-grandsons and is on the edge of an unprecedented growth spurt. Lodge PR Manager Mark Kelly said the fat hit the fire in 2002, when Lodge introduced pre-seasoned cast-iron cookware.

One drawback for many cooks is the seasoning involved with cast iron that makes it non-stick. Fresh from the box, cast iron is a bit of a sticky nightmare. But with patient seasoning – infusing the porous iron with vegetable oil until it becomes non-stick – the pot or pan can be an absolute joy to cook with. That process, though, has kept many first-time cast-iron buyers away.

Between the seasoned line of products and the then-new visibility to be got from the fledgling Food Network and the Internet, Lodge has seen such extensive growth that it’s planning a major expansion of its foundry that will increase production capacity by 40 percent to help it meet customer demand.

“People respect a company that’s been around for 100 years because they recognize that if you’ve been around that long, you must be doing something right,” Kelly says.

Basic Care and Feeding of Cast Iron

You have two basic choices when buying a cast-iron pot. You can buy one already seasoned, like Lodge’s, or you can season your own pan. If you buy an antique pan, you’ll probably want to clean it first (spray it with oven cleaner, wait 30 minutes, then wash in warm, soapy water and dry with paper towels, or use a lye soak, which is what Greg Stahl of the Wagner & Griswold Society does), and then re-season it.

Years of seasoning forms a rich patina on cast iron cookware. Image credit: Lee Davenport.

Post the question “How do I season a cast-iron pot?” online, and you’ll get a  plethora of answers. I turned to the anal-retentive culinary experts at Cook’s Illustrated for their how-tos (published January 2011).

1. 1. Warm an unseasoned pan for 15 minutes in a 200-degree oven to open its pores.
   2. Remove the pan from the oven. Place 1 tablespoon flaxseed oil in the pan and, using tongs, rub the oil into the surface with paper towels. With fresh paper towels, thoroughly wipe out the pan to remove excess oil.
   3. Place the oiled pan upside down in a cold oven, then set the oven to its maximum baking temperature. Once the oven reaches its maximum temperature, heat the pan for one hour. Turn off the oven; cool the pan in the oven for at least two hours.
   4. Repeat the process five more times, or until the pan develops a dark, semi-matte surface.

Once it’s seasoned, the care of cast iron is fairly straightforward. I was introduced to cast iron by my husband, who had received a skillet from his father when he left home in the 1970s. One of our first fights as a married couple was when he walked in to the kitchen and found me diligently washing the pan with a scouring pad in hot, soapy water.

A Lodge skillet seasoning in an oven. Image credit: joellevand.

Most experts say warm water and a light scrub will do the trick. Others say there’s no need to wash the pans at all – just a rubdown with paper towels and a light coating of oil to retard rust. I confess that I rinse the pot under warm water and will give it a pass with the sponge for good measure.

Twenty-five years later, our most-used skillet (the 12-inch standby) has never shown a spot of rust or sticking, and it works like a charm.

For more information about cast-iron cookware, check out David Smith’s Web site, www.panman.com, including his comprehensive roster of sizes and volumes of Dutch ovens, skillets, oval roasters, and other pots and pans.

Check out these other kitchen essentials for preparing a meal.

Flame-Blackened Spatula	Flour Sifter	Large Stewing Spoon

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com.

Fig jam preserves. Image credit: Flickr user Eunice.

This being the 1970s, she canned.

I can still see those green beans, their slightly dingy vert color in the quart jars, awaiting their ultimate destiny in a Three-Bean Salad or Green Bean Casserole. (My personal favorite is still made the old-fashioned way, with Cream of Mushroom soup and those crunchy store-bought onions on top.)

It sounds so antiquated, but, as the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

As more people are looking for healthier and local food sources, food preservation is seeing a resurgence. When you pick up your share from the local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), who hasn’t been left with bunches of things like kohlrabi? Or those bushels of peaches and red-ripe tomatoes that practically leap into your car at the farmers’ market?

A CSA share with kohlrabi, among other vegetables. Image credit: Flickr user thebittenword.com.

Time-tested techniques like canning, drying and, in an homage to electricity, freezing, are breaking out in kitchens across America, says Sherri Brooks Vinton, one of the emerging doyennes of home food preservation.

“I don’t think everybody just flocked to their canners all of the sudden,” Brooks Vinton says. “It’s part of an organized progression to getting a CSA share or going to their local farmers’ market and wanting to hold on to that.”

Brooks Vinton didn’t start out to be some New Age food devotée. Her journey to eating local began back in 2000, when she and her husband went on a pre-kid cross-country road trip in hopes of eating their way across America. What she found was disappointing.

“I was hoping to enjoy all this local food, but there was none,” she says, reflecting on the styro-food chains that had taken over. As her children came along, the desire to eat healthily became a vocation.

When she was publicizing her first book, The Real Food Revival, in 2005, audiences were just grasping concepts like “organic” or “grass-fed.”

Each year, interest and adoption has blossomed, she says, to the point where today it’s commonplace to see demonstrations at farmers’ markets on how to use new or unusual fruits and vegetables.

For newbie fresh foodies, canning is often the gateway drug, and we can thank Napoleon Bonaparte for it.

In 1801, Bonaparte offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a way to preserve food for the French army on the march. Nicolas Appert (1749-1841) was a brewer and confectioner from Champage who discovered that heating food in sealed glass jars for a sustained period of time killed off the microorganisms that caused spoilage.

At left, a portrait of Nicolas Appert. Image credit: anonymous woodcut, circa 1841. At right, an Appert canning jar. Image credit: Jean-Paul Barbier collection, Musée de Châlons en Champagne.

The process he created around 1810 (and for which he won Bonaparte’s prize) is called Appertization, and it’s the basis for commercial canning and the sterilization techniques we use today.

Many home cooks, raised on fears of botulism, shy away from canning. But by following instructions and maintaining good, basic cleanliness, it’s easy and, dare I say, fun.

My first experience canning was after I bought a crate of apricots, those temptingly gorgeous slightly fuzzy ovals, just begging to be caressed. Alas, I discovered that I didn’t really like eating apricots out of hand, but I couldn’t bear to let them go to waste.

A quick search online led me to Ball, the jar company, and the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, which you may recognize from your mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen. It’s a stalwart, but sometimes the recipe scale is just so large, it can seem daunting. The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving became my second starter guide.

Preserves being heated in Ball jars. Image credit: Flickr user Amie Fedora.

The Fresh Apricot Jam recipe hooked me with its simplicity, and the jewel-like jars of the finished jam made me feel like a food genius.

Still, let’s face it. How many times have you gotten a jar of preserves or stared at your own handiwork on your shelves and not known how to use it all?

Put ‘Em Up, Fruit author Sherri Brooks Vinton.
Image credit: © Chris Bartlett.

Brooks Vinton’s newest book, Put ‘Em Up, Fruit offers a guide and cookbook to not only put up fruit, but also ways to use up the put-up goods.“There’s only so much toast and scones you can eat,” Brooks Vinton says with a laugh.

Put ‘Em Up, Fruit is a terrific resource for using up that surplus jam by turning it into dipping sauces, using it as a base for a pan sauce with meat dishes or creating a flavorful vinaigrette. You name it and Brooks Vinton has come up with a way to use it up.

Starting with fruit and a make-it-yourself hot-water canner, the allure of fresh summer food can last all year long — even when it’s dismally cold and raining in January.

Before you know it, you might move on to canning vegetables, de-hydrating, salting or dry-curing meats and fish.

And don’t even get me started on pickles.

Rooftop Ready Seeds	Pickle Fork	Deluxe Kitchen Set

Laura Grimmer is a professional cook and sommelier who lives to eat, drink and provide sustenance. She came late to the culinary world, selling her PR firm and enrolling at the French Culinary Institute because of a borderline fixation on master chef Jacques Pépin. She left cooking school a classically trained chef with a deeply seated appreciation for tradition in the kitchen. www.perfectpairnyc.com.

What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the simplicity and the appreciation I would gain for those who are able to turn out good food, every day.

Cooking an exceptional meal or dish need not be a complex science; you simply need a good set of tools.

Before I went to culinary school, I worked 12-hour days and was fortunate to come home to a husband who, as a teacher, got home hours before me and cooked dinner. After 20 years, our roles have changed, and I have gained an entirely new perspective on what it takes to put dinner on the table. Every night. In a reasonable timeframe.

Forget about celebrity chefs with a team of hired hands developing recipes and chopping all their mise en place. I’m talking about home cooks who, day in and day out, feed their families. My toque is off to you.

What I’ve found is that the same basic techniques and approaches I learned in culinary school are things many of the best home cooks already do. My mother just seemed to know how to thicken gravy with butter and flour, no recipe needed. My grandmother’s tomato sauce, which she’ll describe as “a little of this, a little of that” is actually made in a very traditional French technique, where you sauté the aromatic vegetables (onions, garlic, carrots, celery) before adding the tomatoes and cooking, cooking, cooking everything down to its vegetal, tomato-y essence.

The best home cooks seek recipes and tools that are quick and simple to use, to clean, and to put away. Things that make their lives easier, and their dinners faster to prepare.

The right selection of tools expedites breakfast preparation, too.

While foams, whips and sous-vide cooking are très façonnable, there are some basic tools that professional kitchens share with home cooks. They may not sound fancy, but they’re there for a reason: They work. They have a purpose that is clear.

When I’m cooking for a private client or my own dinners, there are some perhaps surprising basics I must have. I even tote them with me when I work from someone else’s home, to ensure I’ve got the right equipment to do the cooking.

The best kitchen implements stand the test of time. On the left, a flour sifter from the storied American manufacturer Jacob Bromwell, circa 1920s. On the right, a new Jacob Bromwell Flour Sifter — its graphics have been updated but its form is unchanged.

Here’s the kicker: The “newest” of these tools was developed in the 1800s. Because things work for a reason.

1. Two good knives. Just two. A 3- or 4-inch paring knife and a large chef’s knife. No serrated blade, no fancy handle or specialty metal – just knives. They don’t have to be expensive, but they need to be sharp. With those two knives, you can pretty much do anything. While it’s handy to have a boning knife or a slicing knife, the chef’s knife will be able to handle just about anything. Just keep it sharp.
   

   A regularly sharpened chef’s knife, like this carbon steel one (photo credit: Fat Iris),
   will give its owner years of exemplary service.

    

2. A pair of tongs. Even when you’re not grilling? Yes. Simple metal tongs – the kind with the spring in the handle – are like having a third hand in the kitchen. This tool has been around forever, in every culture. They’re indispensible for picking up meat, tossing a salad, stirring anything in a sauté pan. I use them to pull pans toward me from the oven (avoiding those forearm burns from the top of the oven), I lift lids from boiling pots with them instead of using a potholder. You want the ones that are solid metal. Avoid ones with a little locking mechanism or even the metal band that slides down to hold them together. You want them handy, able to grab in a single motion.
3. A wooden spoon. Preferably the kind with the flat edge, which isn’t really a spoon but it’s also not really a spatula. Use it to stir. Everything. It also scrapes the bottom of the pan, or mixes cookie dough, or stirs granola.
4. A peeler. The metal vegetable peeler – either the long skinny kind or the Y-shape (I’m a Y-shape myself) – is your friend. The fixed-edge straight design was supposedly created by a blacksmith in the 1800s, but leave it to the Swiss to elevate the design. The so-called Zena Rex peeler, invented in 1947 by Swiss native Alfred Neweczerzal, was even featured on a 2004 Swiss postage stamp. Of course, yours doesn’t have to be expensive (or Swiss). I pick up my plastic-handed peeler at a local kitchen shop for about $3, so I don’t feel bad when I toss it as the edge loses its mojo. From potatoes and carrots, to citrus peels, it just makes peeling easier.
5. Proper measuring cups. No heart-shaped measuring cups or the chunky plastic cups held together by a rubber ring. Just the traditional dry measuring cups, the plain metal kind with flat rims, so it’s easy to use the back edge of the knife to slide across and get an accurate measurement. And the nesting clear-glass cups for liquids. Basic. Pure. And be sure you’re watching the lines for cups vs. liters. While the European method of listing recipe ingredients by weight or volume (liters, grams) does make it more precise, American recipes listing cups and teaspoons and tablespoons works just fine.

Certainly, there are many other tools that I wouldn’t choose to live without, like a beautiful wooden cutting board, my electric water kettle, a waiter’s corkscrew, a microplane grater, a fine strainer, whisks or a food processor. And I do love my offset spatula and my stand mixer.

Hudson Made’s line of kitchen boards — made from long-lasting black walnut — act as both an excellent cutting and serving surface.

But those five tools will get me just about anywhere in the kitchen. Nothing sexy. Nothing new either. The thing is, they were first created because they filled a basic need. And for the most part, we haven’t found the need to improve on them in thousands of years.

If it ain’t broke…

Want to simplify your cooking routine? Check out some of our most popular kitchen products:

Large Red Oak Cutting Board	Deluxe Kitchen Set	Large Stewing Spoon