THE SKILLET
“The exterior is encrusted from decades on the woodstove that was Grandma's only cooktop.”
There are keepers and there are throwers, and Grandma Begovich was a thrower. A loving woman hunched by hard work, her impulse was to feed everyone she met and give anyone in need what they needed. During my mother's Depression-era childhood, when the family lived in a duplex owned by the Wyoming coal mine that underpaid my grandfather, Mom and her brothers would come home from school to find that their extra clothes had been dispatched to cousins in Croatia. In one legendary purge, my grandmother gave away my uncle's letterman jacket the summer before his senior year. "You hadn't worn it in a week!" she said.
Maybe this is the reason my mother liberated the skillet—to prevent its being given away. I can't swear Mom swiped it, but when I asked her about the time Grandma gave it to her, she went uncharacteristically mute. She needn't have: The skillet was well worth pilfering. Weighing north of 5½ pounds, 10 inches wide, with sides a spectacular 3 inches high, it's an implement that can handle anything (including, I've often thought, an intruder). The exterior is encrusted from decades on the woodstove that was Grandma's only cooktop. The interior has a seasoning so velvety, it could probably, if left out with fat and flour, make a roux by itself.
Back in Wyoming, Grandma would have used the skillet to prepare a hundred variations on the cheap cuts of meat she could afford. She could make anything taste good, a talent that sadly did not get passed on. My mother, a resentful cook, pulled out the skillet to serve an unvarying plate of bacon and eggs for my father in the morning, and fired it up again in the evening for pork chops or fried potatoes. In my kitchen, it produces stir-fries and pasta sauces. I like to think it imparts a subtle iron-y essence to its foods, but that's probably me romanticizing.
When my mother was downsizing her belongings before moving to a retirement community, she told me to make a list of any items I might like for myself. She, a keeper, was proud of her beautiful house, its rugs from a country still called Persia when she got them, its breakfronts full of china and crystal.
The list I handed her consisted of one item: "Grandma's skillet."
"I'm serious," she said.
"So am I."
She got mad and didn't talk to me for a while.
I didn't mean to annoy her, but I was living 2,000 miles away in a house that had no room for Persian rugs. And anyway, I knew with sinking certainty that I would be inheriting the lot of it—china, crystal, silver—all too soon.
Grandma died in 1988, Mom twenty years later. At 63, I'm now the oldest female in my family. I use the skillet every day, lest the ghost of my grandmother get a notion to dispatch it to Croatia. Picking it up takes almost all my strength. Holding onto it—even though I'm a thrower—takes none.