Iron Man

For thirty-five years, McIrish and I have disagreed about one thing more than any other.

Cast iron frying pans.

We have three. Mind you, the first one belonged to my great-grandfather, so in a way, I was the first one to introduce them to the household. This particular frying pan sat rusting in the drawer beneath my mother’s oven. “Oh, that old thing,” Mom said. McIrish saw it, lunged and suddenly became…how can I say this?…a rabid cult member of the Cast Iron Coalition.

He found a second cast iron frying pan at the dump’s swap pile and came home quivering with excitement. I sighed. Great. A third joined the others. Every time I cooked, I felt like Ma from Little House in the Prairie.

I hated those frying pans. They take five minutes to heat up, ten to cool down. And then there was cleaning them. Everything stuck, and it took forever to clean.

“You can’t wash it with soap!” McIrish said, the first hint that our marriage was on the rocks.

“Am I supposed to make scrambled eggs on top of this…this fish gunk?” I asked, dry heaving.

“It’s called seasoning,” he said.

“It’s called disgusting,” I said. (Note: My sister-in-law, married to McIrish’s brother, feels the same way. We have bonded over this.)

“Just wash it with water,” McIrish said.

“That’s not washing it. That’s rinsing.”

“You’ll ruin the pan,” he said.

“It’s a hundred years old!”

We agreed to disagree. In other words, I washed it with soap when he wasn’t looking. To replace the “seasoning,” I’d drizzle some olive oil in it, wipe it with a paper towel and pretend I hadn’t used it. Every couple of months, McIrish would reverently oil the pans, set them in the oven on low for a few hours. I would forget they were in there, turn on the oven to bake cookies, only to be greeted by a billowing cloud of smoke. Sigh.

Our children side-eyed their father as he hovered after they’d made eggs or a grilled cheese. For Christmas, Dearest Son gave McIrish a little sponge wrapped in armor made specially for cleaning cast iron frying pans. Someone got a tiny cast iron frying pan as a joke. We bought special spray for cast iron frying pans. Honestly, they were treated better than most children.

However, McIrish’s method of washing the pan was…well…not up to my standards. “Not clean,” I would snarl/say. “See? Right here? Last night’s supper.” I would then soap up the Scrub Daddy and wash it, staring him in the eye as I did.

“You’re ruining it,” he’d growl.

I looked up Can you clean a cast iron frying pan with soap and found three reliable sources that said yes, Kristan, you can. McIrish did not accept said evidence. The armored sponge remained.

Then there’s how heavy those bleeping things are. Though I am weirdly strong, my wrist would shake with the effort of holding it. It weighs upward of eight pounds, and to tip out the ingredients onto a platter…ouch. “It’s so (bleeping) heavy,” I would say, and McIrish would scurry to help me. This irked me. I don’t like asking for help when it involves physical strength. I might die opening a jar, but at least I’ll go down with my dignity.

After three decades of this psychological abuse, I put my foot down. “I’m buying a nonstick frying pan,” I announced one day. “And you know you’ll be using this and think it was your idea.”

“No, I won’t,” he said.

Wives are seldom wrong. McIrish quickly fell under the spell of nonstick cookware, seduced by how easy it was to clean, how making an egg didn’t require ten minutes of cast iron worship, how light it was. For the next few years, I commented on his use of my frying pan. Wasn’t it great? Didn’t he love it? No cast iron today? Such is marriage.

Five years later (yesterday), McIrish came to me, humbled. “I need to tell you something, honey,” he said. Based on his expression, he was about to tell me he had a terminal disease.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m going to buy some nonstick pans.” He sighed in acceptance, having already worked through the bargaining, anger and denial phases of grief. “The cast iron pans are just too hard.”

“Really?” I said. “Huh. And it only took you thirty-five years to figure that out. Imagine.”

“You were right,” he said, the three hottest words in the English language.

“I’m going to write about this,” I said.

“I knew you would.” The mark of a real man—letting his wife have the win. It may have taken three and a half decades, but even so. True love, baby.