Le creuset

I don’t know how many teenagers are given a frying pan for their 18th birthday. Perhaps my friends managed to intuit my food-writing future, despite my party piece back then being an extremely tomato-heavy bolognaise. Twenty-five years on, having somehow survived university halls of residence and flatmates using – the horror – metal utensils in it, that beautifully thick-bottomed frying plan lives at the bottom of an excessively large pile of frying pans, well past its best. But even as the pile threatens to get taller than the cupboard, I can’t bear the idea of throwing it away. I’ve loved and lost too many pans to count. I had a little milk pan, perfect for a single portion of porridge, until the surface started flaking off.

Miles Coverdale’s translation of Psalm 105 in the Book of Common Prayer elevated iron from metallurgical to literary significance. The story of Joseph being sold unjustly as a bondservant — “Whose feet they hurt in the stocks: the iron entered into his soul” — shames flaccid times like ours. And iron’s virtues excel not least of all in cooking, where it can enter literally into our bodies and, who knows, maybe our souls too. Joseph just got things started. Think of the first ironclads, Monitor and Merrimac, hammering away at each other at Hampton Roads in 1862, of the dreadnoughts that put paid to Nelson’s wooden walls, of Agatha Christie’s ironclad alibis, of the verse in Christina Rossetti’s great carol: “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.

If you’re trying to determine someone’s class and the accent is hard to place, you could do worse than check the brand of their pans. Le Creuset has been a staple of upper-middle class British kitchens for years – the sort of Eurocentric brand that contains just a hint of francophile exoticism whilst conjuring up the British comfort food of old: casseroles, stews and soups. And, if Instagram is anything to go by, Millennials are also cottoning onto the appeal. With the rise of #cottagecore and the boom in home cooking that came about over lockdown, Le Creuset doesn’t seem to be disappearing any time soon.