If I had to choose  just one one cooking utensil, it would be my grandmother Muddie’s cast-iron skillet. My mother inherited it and passed it on to me when she realized my passion for cooking.  And  like I do today, my grandmother used that pan for everything from baking rolls to frying fish.

Cast iron is the perfect cookware because it retains and distributes heat evenly, and becomes seasoned over time – the  longer the  better. Cast-iron pots, pans and dutch ovens come in several sizes and shapes. My 12 -incher, well-seasoned through three generations, is at least 50 years old.

This skillet can never be replaced. Muddie died two decades ago, but I can still picture her frying fish or making succotash in the same  frying pan that  I use to bake cornbread,  fry chicken, sauté vegetables, roast a leg of lamb or create  my own special version of her  succotash.

Ten years ago, our kitchen was so small that two people couldn’t work comfortably in it at the same time. Over the years, we’ve been renovating, but at one point it was so crowded that I’d  store my pots and pans in the oven to make space. One day when my new stove arrived and I was at work, my mate  Natu forgot  to retrieve the pots and pans  from the oven before the delivery man hauled the old one away.

It was the  dead of winter,  there was snow everywhere and the old stove had been dumped  at a junkyard  miles away from our house. I didn’t care about any of  my other cookware, but when I found out that my cast-iron pan was missing, I was devastated and  gave my man the silent  treatment for days. No matter how much he apologized, I was really depressed about that skillet. It was one of those heartbreakers that I’d have to learn to live with, and I stayed  in a real blue funk about it.

Then one day, I came home to find it  sitting on top of my bright new stove. I felt like I’d hit the lottery. Desperate to fix his mistake, Natu had tracked down the delivery man and driven 50  miles,  trudged through two fields of snow to the junkyard, poked  through thousands of  discarded appliances and found our yellow stove. The pan was still inside the oven. 

It’s a miracle that he found it, and I feel grateful that he realized how important my grandmother’s cast -iron skillet was to me,  felt awful about losing it and cared enough to go  find it and bring it back home.

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