Found out my grandma's 60 year old pan was never once seasoned with oil

I was cleaning out my grandma's kitchen in Tucson last weekend and grabbed her old cast iron skillet to take home, and my aunt told me grandma never seasoned it with oil a single time in 60 years. Turns out she just cooked bacon and cornbread in it constantly, wiped it with a rag, and that was it, the pan has a glassy black surface you could not buy new. I have spent whole Saturdays doing oven seasoning rounds on my newer pans and hers beats all of them. So was all that oven work ever really needed, or does daily cooking just do the job on its own?

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elizabeth_williams1mo ago

Grandma out here getting better results by accident than me getting worse results on purpose, and I have a $40 bottle of flaxseed oil to prove it. Honestly the bacon and cornbread did the heavy lifting, all that fat and heat over and over for decades basically built the seasoning for her one meal at a time. My oven rounds work okay but they are thin and even, while hers got layers from real cooking, grease splatter and all. I bet wiping it with a rag instead of scrubbing it with soap kept every bit of that goodness in place too. So no, the oven stuff is not a total waste, it just gets you a head start instead of the real thing. Cooking in it often is what actually makes the pan, and your grandma basically ran a 60 year experiment that proves it.

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