In Southern culture sharing a home cooked meal is important. In my family we cook the most in our cast iron pan.  The pan passed from my great-grandfather to my grandmother to my dad and will one day be mine. One of the ways my dad and I bond is through cooking. He loves to teach me the recipes his mom taught him. My grandmother's father was from eastern North Carolina, he was a tobacco farmer and she helped him on the farm. Eventually she met my grandfather who was from lower Alabama. When my grandmother moved to the Triad she brought the pan with her. Before she died of dementia she gave the pan to my dad and his wife, my step-mom who immigrated here from Cambodia. So throughout the pan’s life it has cooked a mix of eastern North Carolininian, lower Alabamian, and Cambodian food. The pan is old enough it doesn't have a brand name or label but is estimated to be 150 years old. While America is older than the pan, it has also collected different cultures from around the world and mixed them together. A key trait about cast iron is that it should not be washed with soap  as that would wash away all of the seasoning from the many different things that have been cooked in the pan. You wouldn't want to wash away the history of the many different cultures that come together in America; you wouldn't wash the pan. To wash the pan is to wash away the seasoning that makes it great. To wash away the many cultures that make America great would essentially be erasing our history. 

– EH

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