Pans and Sisters and Tarte Tatins

My sister Maya and I have lived together all but seven years of our lives.

(Which would be more impressive if you knew how old we were, but I’m not going to tell you.)

I went off to college at eighteen, took a year off, graduated, moved into a little studio apartment in downtown Portland, Oregon, worked several jobs, and then had a baby. When he (the baby) was almost a year old, Maya and I moved into what would be the first of six dwellings we would share. It was the basement apartment in the building where I lived—dark, labyrinthine, and many-roomed (there were three we never even used). It was also cheap, nestled as it was next to the apartment’s laundry room (imagine the laundry room from Rosemary’s Baby where Rosemary meets the soon-to-be-deceased neighbor and you’ve got it) and untouched since the pre-electricity days when it had been built.

The kitchen was the happiest (also, brightest) room in the place and once Maya and I moved in together, actual cooking took place in it (I was almost entirely disinterested in cooking, let alone baking until I moved in with Maya). As a housewarming gift, our dad gave us a set of cast iron pans—a ten-inch and a six-inch. They weighed about 5 tons combined and at first seemed to me more like potential weapons than kitchen utensils. My dad had gotten the pans on sale at Fred Meyer and they were the first cast iron pans that anyone in my family had ever bought. Maya was pretty excited and went through a long, involved seasoning ceremony complete with explanations of how much better it was to use cast iron because of the iron it imparted to the food and how they were naturally nonstick without any of the horrible chemicals and how they cooked more evenly and stayed hot and…

Okay, I thought, it’s just a pan.

Mais non.

These pans (the good kind—because there are always shoddy knockoffs) are so sturdy that they turn up occasionally in venues like The Antiques Roadshow. They can turn into heirlooms. And some of them have indeed doubled as weapons which gives the meals made in them the flavor of that much more history.

We don’t often use the smaller one, but the ten-inch pan gets a workout in our house. We cook almost everything in it. Twenty-five years later it’s still going strong—blackened and seasoned with age and countless sautéed rounds of tofu, vegetables, fried rice, pasta, and much more. Nothing we have cooked in this pan has defeated it. It comes clean every time and is ready for more.  I love this pan. It is easily the most consistent element of my domestic life. Well, and my sister. 

When I started baking seriously, it was inevitable that I would drift into experimenting with tarte tatins, which are best baked in pans exactly like this one. Tarte tatins start with fruit cooked with sugar and butter in the pan and arranged in a pretty pattern. The fruit is then covered with puff pastry and finished in the oven. Then you flip it over onto a plate and hope for the best. My first effort was a bit of a disaster. Unfortunately, I’d opted to try a mango tarte tatin—a big mistake for a neophyte. I’d used too much sugar or the mangoes were too ripe and I didn’t have a good feel for pastry of any kind. It stuck and burned horribly and I feared for the life of the pan. This happened a dozen years ago and I still remember the flop sweat I was covered in as I tried to scrape the burned bits off my warhorse pan without destroying it. This episode scared me off tarte tatins for a while but eventually I took the plunge again. Firmer fruit, less liquid, more caution with the sugar.

Last night I tried it again—making a cherry tomato tarte tatin with a recipe I’d modified from one I found in The New York Times years ago. The original recipe made a delicious but very sweet tart so I cut the sugar, added a little more vinegar, and played with the seasonings a bit. It looked great going into the oven but, as ever, there was that frisson of worry as I went to invert it (using two hands and a great deal of care) onto the plate.

Perfect.

The pan? Completely clean.

Success. 
(If you want the recipe, let me know.)