ANOTHER SHADE OF GREY Cast iron cookware still relevant in modern times

• Published date: 16 April 2024
• Author: Robin Shepherd Robin Shepherd is a Kawakawa-born writer, artist farmer one-time educator, historian and resident mainly in Te Hiku for 78 of his 88 years. He has been persistently involved in community development.
• Publication title: Northland Age, The

The first was letting me know that the heirloom camp oven which I had given him was recently put to work cooking a stew in the embers of a fire. He was delighted with the result. I enjoyed it also. The second was a young man who had bought a very expensive cast iron combination casserole dish and fry pan and was waxing lyrical about his success with cooking steak grilled on the hot surface using an induction stove top as the heat source

Like many cooks, I have always had cast iron cooking vessels of one type or another in daily use. Some enamelled and others as bare metal.

Many years ago I found a cast iron Go Ashore pot which had somehow found its way into the bank of a stream. The local museum said that it was probably one of the hundreds traded in the early days with Māori. These simple pot-bellies changed the whole diet and food handling of those people and altered daily life. With a simple pot, the labour-intensive and resource-demanding hāngī became less important...