The Curious Case of the Perilous Pan

If you’re ever going about your daily business and happen across a discarded eight-inch cast-iron skillet, do the right thing and retrieve it. Even if you have to stop traffic on a major highway or interrupt a funeral procession, pick that thing up and make sure it’s disposed of properly, where nobody will ever find it again. Maybe even throw it in the ocean.

When I was a kid, my mother owned that exact frying pan. Every morning, she would cook herself one fried egg — presumably because that’s all the skillet would hold — which she’d eat for breakfast along with a bowl of nasty oatmeal. Blech!

There was one strict rule in our home: Nobody but my mom was ever allowed to cook anything in the small frying pan. Almost every time something was cooked in that little death-trap it would result in a fire because the pan’s walls were too low to separate the sputtering, popping grease from the open flames.

One thing you need to know about my mother: she could squeeze twenty cents worth of change out of a nickel. If she were alive today to hear that the U.S. government had discontinued production of the penny, she’d make the evening news by going on a deadly rampage.

My mom was cheaper than cheap because she grew up on an Oklahoma sharecropper’s farm in the midst of the dust bowl and great depression. All six kids shared a single bedroom with three girls crammed into a double (not queen-size) bed and all three boys sharing another. The hired hand slept in the barn.

Consequently, it came as no surprise, that my mom, who had grown up getting by on next to nothing, would own a housefire-in-the-making, tiny skillet because it allowed her to use only enough grease for a single egg and one egg for breakfast was all she’d grown up eating.

Now, I’m not saying my brother and I totally disregarded my mother’s rule. My older sisters did out of shear rebellion, but my brother and I were more obedient. We only broke the rule a couple times a week and ONLY out of absolute necessity. It was fate which pitted that rule against one of my mother’s other quirks.

Every Thursday night, when we’d return from our weekly grocery-shopping outing, my mom would use an old peanut butter jar lid to shape ten pounds of ground meat into patties and put the whole stack of perfectly formed patties (divided by wax paper) into the freezer. As it happened, a single hamburger patty, pried off the frozen stack with a butter knife, would fit neatly into that cast-iron incendiary device.

At least twice a week, after school, my brother and I would watch Superman on the floor model RCA television while our parents were still at work. In order to stave off death from starvation, we’d take turns frying up fresh hot burgers in the little greasy skillet. And, at least once a week, the damned thing would catch fire. We always kept a pan lid handy to smother out the fire, so I guess that was the beginning of us learning to plan ahead.

When my ninth-grade health class teacher tried to convince us that the way to put out a grease fire was to pour flour onto it, I laughed out loud and told him that might be the way they did it where he came from, but around here, we always used a lid. After all, by ninth grade, I was already a six-year veteran of the grease fire wars. In fact, I even had a burn scar under my right wrist from once being hypnotized by the flames and waiting a little too long to slam down the lid.

Fast-forward nearly fifty years. When my mom died, all five of us kids gathered at her home to cart off anything we each found sentimental. Somehow, I forgot to snag that little fire-breathing skillet. Or perhaps my sneaky brother stole it before I got around to staking my claim.

To this day, every time I eat a hamburger — and that’s a routine occurrence for me — I think about fire safety. Maybe all the stupid stuff we did as kids gave us at least a modicum of foresight. But I’d still advise against anyone exposing their youngsters to an eight-inch cast-iron frying pan. Teach ‘em to shoot guns instead. It’s safer.

A meeting of great minds who think alike