Jeffrey Steingarten has stocked his kitchen with everything from fine copper saucepans to a Sichuan hot pot—but his humble cast-iron skillet is the only essential tool of the trade.
I have read that some people—mostly women, I believe, but I’m not sure—are so preoccupied with their own feet that they compulsively buy new shoes to put them into. As I understand it, these people have only two feet, just as I do. They can wear no more than one pair of shoes at a time, and yet they own dozens, scores, even hundreds. I am dumbfounded by people like them.
In stark contrast, it is pots and pans and other cooking vessels that I find awfully difficult to resist, or at least I once did. There is a pot or a pan for every purpose under the sun, and I believe that by now I possess a clear majority of them. Whenever I returned from expeditions foreign and domestic I would bring home a gleaming trophy or two of brass or copper, of iron or aluminum, of stainless steel or clay. Unlike shoes, many more than two pots can be used at the same time.
Throughout the nineties, when I wrote about Paris as often as I was allowed to, I’d return from every trip with a new copper pot, lined with tin or stainless steel—or unlined, for confiture—until I had a dozen of them in graduated sizes. And whenever a recipe called for a pot I lacked, I would rush out and find one—perhaps a stockpot even larger than my largest, or a covered copper pan designed solely for the preparation of pommes Anna. The vessels I valued most were ancient designs meant for only one iconic dish that had the power to sum up an entire cuisine, an entire world. Some of these are simple: a deep, wide brass Japanese bowl for frying tempura; lovely little gleaming spherical brass pots we found in India 30 years ago; a saç from Gaziantep in Turkey—like a blackened wok you invert over a flame to use as a domed griddle for cooking flatbreads. And there is a different couscoussier from every trip to Morocco.
Have you ever tried a Sichuan hot pot? It requires a large copper bowl, thin and unlined and divided by a copper strip shaped into a yin-yang curve. One half is filled with a mild stock, probably made from pork bones, and the other with a spicy, pungent broth whose surface is paved with hot peppers. The bowl sits on a stand over a gas flame in the center of your table.