On Cast Iron, Lard, and Frying

Since I first began writing about cooking in cast iron in the 1980s, southern cooking has taken on a new life. Now there are as many southern food experts as there are Italian, which is no wonder, since the South has more than twice the population of Italy. Many culinarians argue that they have always washed their cast iron with soap and water, as did their grandmothers. My friend the Georgia cookbook author Virginia Willis, whom I have known for more than thirty years, admitted in Garden & Gun that she does, adding, “But if someone else’s grandmother taught them otherwise, who am I to tell them their grandmother was wrong?”