Classic Kitchen Cast Iron

By Roy Nuhn

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, July 2009                  

Types of cast metal have being used in cooking for centuries; however true cast iron did not have a major role in the kitchen until the 1860s.

Today classic kitchen cast iron is not only eye appealing to decorating collectors but winning a following of those who enjoy cooking with it as well.

An early cast iron favorite was the muffin pans.  In 1859 a Boston merchant obtained patents on a number of cast iron muffin pans, many of which would remain remarkably similar to others for more than 50 years.

In the 1860s there was a great demand for cast iron cake pans to bake gem muffins.  Gems was actually the brand name of a commercial baking powder used in muffin making, however the name became standard and was soon applied to the cast iron pans themselves.

Ironically the original gem muffins or Wisconsin cakes, were "hardly gemlike" according to William Woys Weaver author of America Eats.  They were instead, "a coarse wheat-bran muffin introduced by abolitionist cooks to avoid having to use ingredients produced by slave labor."

The legendary Griswold Company existed only as the Selden & Griswold Manufacturing Company in the 1860s and provided just a limited number of cooking items including a square frying pan.

For the most part the cast iron cooking ware, or hollow ware as it would be known commercially, produced during the third quarter of the 19th century came from stove companies.  Their ware naturally was specifically designed to fit their stoves.  The products of non-stove makers tended to work on all stoves.

Among the early makers were Brown-Bowman, Read's Pan, Jos Bell and Company, and George Starrett.

In the 1880s the Griswold Company was producing cast iron cooking ware on an extensive scale, first using the name Erie and later the full firm identification.

The catalogs of leading hardware stores offered an amazing selection of the 'hollow ware' including Yankee bowls, tea kettles, spiders (small frying pans), griddles and pans.  The Simmons Hardware Company, for example, listed baking pans of every shape including round, square, oval and even oblong.

In 1895 the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalog drew from a growing number of foundries in the United States to present customers with the widest variety yet of cast iron cooking ware.

They featured lots of gem pans, and a waffle iron produced by the Wagner Manufacturing Co. in Sidney, Ohio.  However one of their biggest sellers was Schofield's Patent cake griddle.  The catalog proclaimed these griddles "makes better cakes than any other griddle ever invented, because the little pans are deep and hold the batter and prevent it spreading out, getting thin and drying out." Depending on size the pans were billed as provided six to eight cakes per minute.  Cost was 65 cents per pan.

By the dawn of the 20th century cast iron kitchen ware was extremely popular and was being eagerly produced in factories from Connecticut to Missouri and New York to Alabama.  Colorful titles among the makers included Favorite Piqua Ware, Charter Oak Rangers, Wapak Hollow Ware (with the Indian head trademark), and Vollrath Ware.

However the major portion of the early 20th century market was controlled by such producers as Griswold and Wagner Ware manufacturing.

Sears and Roebuck got caught-up with their own brand too and declared in 1908 that Imperial Stove Hollow Ware was “as easy to keep clean as china." Moreover the gray cast iron and pure white porcelain were "united at an intense heat, thereby forming a perfect union of the two."

There were some innovations.

A few years after the Sears ad, Griswold offered the public their delightful Colonial breakfast skillet.  Compartments provided for bacon, hash browns, and eggs according to author Weaver.  "In this unique skillet, an entire colonial meal was condense and frozen for time in iron," adds the researcher.  "It was America's first TV dinner, long before TV."

Yet for all the competition and occasional innovation, the cooking objects themselves generally remained remarkably similar.

In 1918 the Griswold catalog presented a cake griddle almost exactly like the Schofield's cake griddle depicted in the Montgomery Ward catalog more than 20 years earlier.

"It is interesting to note by comparison how very few changes were made in products manufactured during these decades," observes Ronald Barlow in Victorian Houseware, Hardware and kitchenware.  "An 1870s meat grinder looks very much like its 1900s counterpart, and cast iron cookware hardly changed at all."

Griswold continued its prominence in the field into the 1920s with everything from fryers and fruit presses to waffle pans and Whole Wheat Stick pans.

They also developed a series of imaginative magazine advertisements featuring Aunt Ellen.  This Betty Crocker-type figure was actually a Griswold employee, Etta Moses.

"When folks praise my fried chicken I smile and think of my Griswold skillet with its close-fit iron cover," wrote a kindly Aunt Ellen in a 1926 ad for Good Housekeeping.  In another she noted, "when I give my guests waffles, they invariable come to the kitchen to see my waffle iron." Today even the ads themselves are sought by Griswold collectors.

During the 1930s Griswold products were so popular that the company even offered cast iron toy replicas of the firm's cooking ware.

After a half-century of production, Griswold was acquired by rival Wagner Manufacturing in the 1950s.  In the late 1960s, General Housewares Corporation obtained all rights to both Griswold and Wagner products.

Today, Griswold in particular and kitchen cast iron in general enjoys a renewed appreciation.

Typically marked cast iron such as Griswold, Wagner, G.F. Filey, Martin, Wapok, and Waterman is considered more collectible than unmarked examples.

In the book Kitchen Collectibles author Diane Stonebeck relates the story of a collector who came upon a Griswold waffle iron in a San Francisco shop.  The bug bit and in the 15 years that followed the collector acquired 2,000 pieces of cast iron kitchen ware.

Collectors may also contact the Griswold and Cast Iron Cookware Association at PO Box 3613, Richmond, VA 23235 which publishes a newsletter.

Recommended reading:

The Book of Griswold & Wagner by David Smith and Chuck Wafford, Schiffer Publishing.

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