Once you get into historical cooking, you start becoming an equipment collector. The techniques and tools of the past are fascinating, even if we can’t fully replicate them. I am an avid flea market shopper anyway, so this part comes easily to me.
Four weeks ago, I planned to go to the archeological museum in Munich with a friend who lives in Bamberg. In the end, her health did not allow the long trip and extensive walking that day, so we went to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and a flea market in Nuremberg instead. At that flea market, I stumbled across what the owner described as an antique flowerpot and bought it for a lucky 13 Euros.
It turned out to be a three-legged cast-iron cooking pot, much like the grapen I wrote about a little earlier. At 14cm tall and 16cm wide, it is not very large and holds a little over a litre comfortably, but it weighs in at a hefty 1.6kg. Its stint in someone’s garden had not been healthy for it, but the underlying material was sound. I set about rehabilitating it.
The first step was cleaning it. A soak in hot soap water did the trick and it wasn’t even very dirty. Next, the rust needed removing. Fortunately, it was all superficial, a thin layer of reddish brown with no flaking or pitting. I set the pot in a bucket and covered with with hot water and acetic acid. The rust came off easily with a light touch of the wire brush and I was very grateful for the second-hand Dremel set I’d purchased recently. If you want to recover old kitchen equipment, you really want power tools. I used to do this by hand and it is a very frustrating experience.
After the dirt and the rust had come off, a surprise was waiting at the bottom of the pot. I had feared it would be rust-pitted, but instead it was covered in a thick, smooth layer of limescale. How this could have happened is beyond me, but it was lucky because it protected the metal underneath. However, removing this proved a test of patience. I tried to dissolve it with acetic acid, but it proved quite resistant. A wire brush mounted on my electric drill produced white powder, but abraded it so slowly that I would have taken days of work to get it off. in the end, I chose the oldfashioned approach and picked up a hammer.
It was slightly worrying, trying to strike hard enough to shatter the limescale, but not hard enough to damage the metal, and I started out far too timidly. To get at the inside curve, I had to use a 15-cm steel nail that I placed against the side and struck with my hammer. After two weekends of work, I was able to put the cleaned pot into another de-rusting bath, scrub it with steel wool, and begin the seasoning.
Yesterday, I burned in the last coat of canola oil and tested the surface. Water droplets formed and ran off easily, and even a thorough scrubbing did not produce and dirt or rust. It is now ready to join my kitchen gear and I hope to use it for making sauces or small portions of meat and stew.