Posted 2 years ago
dav2no1
(823 items)
1930s Cast Iron Skillets
I found some cast iron kitchen gold! I was cleaning out the cabinets under the glass cooktop. Mom had dozens of pots and pans piled up. I moved a pile and found 4 cast iron Skillets. I'm working on cleaning them up some..I've read that just putting them in the oven on clean cycle is a great way to do this. Any suggestions are welcome.
Wagner Ware 8
Wagner Ware 10
Griswold 8
Griswold ? Looks to be a 5"
From what I can tell, the Griswolds are smooth bottom, large block logo..1930-1939
The Wagners are smooth bottom Wagner Ware logo, so 1935- 1959. I believe these are same era as the Griswolds.
The small Griswold Skillet is in rougher shape on the bottom. It also apperas to have a mark on the handle? From what I've read you might see 1 to 4. Not sure what mine has...
I'll provide links to some good sites that were helpful.
Here are links I used to date my skillets..
https://thepan-handler.com/griswold-cast-iron/
https://www.castironcollector.com/numbers.php
https://www.booniehicks.com/wagner-cast-iron/
Nice find. They don't look too bad, so probably just putting them in a sink with hot soapy water and giving them a good scrub with a stainless steel scrubbing pad would get them cleaned up and then they can be re-seasoned. You don't need to apply a lot of pressure with the scrubbing pad, just enough to get the old seasoning off.
I have never had an oven with the self cleaning feature before so cannot comment on that approach.
I always take the old seasoning off on a mystery skillet, since there is no telling what has been cooked in it before.
I have cleaned a fair bit of cast iron. The worst was a piece that someone had painted black which I had to sandblast. I found it in a curbside garbage pile. No idea why they had painted it. It is an 11.5" Birmingham Range and Stove square griddle that was once my most used piece. Now I use a smaller round Lodge griddle, more often. I have several skillets in the queue which need work but not gotten around to cleaning them after around 25 years....
My family was a Wagner family, so I inherited several well seasoned pieces which just needed a bit of revival. I use #8 and #5 Wagners and a #5 Obrien and Obrien skillet the most, though I have several Griswolds and many different brands and sizes from #3s to #12s.
I have read that coating skillets in Oven Off and putting them in a black plastic garbage bag in the hot sun does a good job when cleaning really dirty ones, but not tried that, yet. I have one very old skillet with the ring bottom for sitting on top of a cast iron stove which has about 100 years of carbon build up on it that I have intended to, but never gotten around to, clean using the oven off method. It has no markings unless they are buried under many decades of carbon build up. I suspect it spent some time on camp fires.
I once knew Slim Pickens grand niece and she gave that old one and several others but some were not great skillets. I will dig them out during my move and take another look at them. She and her husband were part Cherokee and were sometimes homeless, sometimes working street people in Seattle in the 1980s. Can't remember her name, now, but it might come to me.
Ah, Rachel something, I think...
Slim pickens...I remember him on a few episodes of Bonanza...