Copper is the best thing you can buy for your kitchen
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- August 21, 2022
- 631
Standing with a stack of old magazines in my arms, I debated one final time about tossing them. After carefully flipping through to make absolutely sure there were no articles or illustrations I had at some point found valuable, I opened the can lid and heaved them in. Then a couple more armloads of periodicals covering a couple of decades went into the trash for good measure.
I cannot throw away a book, no matter how ruined it might be or how unlikely I am to read it. Magazines are a little easier, but throwing them out leaves residual guilt. People take a great deal of time to produce those things, and their work deserves better treatment than to be summarily discarded.
Magazine publishers are very good at targeting their periodicals to very specific interests. No matter what you like to do or read about, there’s likely a magazine, both in print and digital versions, out there for you.
They can have long shelf lives, which is a good thing for advertisers. We have magazines from more than a hundred years ago. I doubt the team who created Campbell’s Soup ads in 1921 ever dreamed their work would still be making impressions a century later or that Campbell’s would still be making soups, but here we are.
I have auto repair shop magazines from a century ago and a pile of 1930s Esquire.
Cooks tend to accumulate magazines as quickly as cookbooks, and we have subscribed to several. Bon Appetite, Saveur and, most recently, Cook’s Illustrated have been favorites.
We’ve dropped all our subscriptions because we were just throwing them out anyway, but my last issue of Cook’s Illustrated came this week. I’m happy to not renew, even though it has proven to be one of the most useful magazines we’ve read, with product reviews, good tips and unusual recipes.
The autumn issue has an article about copper pans with some significant misinformation I want to share in case you also get this magazine. In a small sidebar, Cook’s Illustrated placed tin-lined copper pans, as an afterthought, as the only kind of copper pan to avoid. This is codswallop.
Genuine copper cookware is probably the best thing you can buy for your kitchen. It’s so durable your great-grandchildren will just begin to get a good patina. The good stuff is expensive, so it’s not something most of us can afford to buy as a big set. Watch for it every time you find yourself in an antique or thrift store because some nice pieces end up there.
Note that the “copper” nonstick pans that have been prominently featured in many stores are not made of copper, are paper thin and burn everything.
You can get stainless cookware with a disk of copper sandwiched into the bottom, and these take advantage of copper’s excellent heating qualities.
The very best investment you can make in cookware is thick-walled, heavy-weight, tin-lined copper cookware. Stainless steel lining, the other option, delivers the worst of all worlds. Everything will stick to the stainless interior, and you’ll have to constantly polish the exterior. Steel heats in an entirely different way than copper, so the metals fight each other. Not so with tin, which is molecularly similar to copper, and the two metals work well in tandem. In my experience tin is a naturally nonstick surface, and I’ve never had problems with burning or sticking.
Cook’s Illustrated took the ridiculous position that the tin lining might melt at high cooking temperatures, which is again false. You aren’t going to leave any pot on a raging heat source long enough to melt metal, and in any case copper cookware has been that standard in the best kitchens in the world for centuries, which would be untrue if the pans melted in use.
Over time the tin lining will abrade and wear away, but there are still many businesses that specialize in relining copper cookware. It’s worth the trouble of relining your pans every 150 years or so.
Even well-respected journals get things wrong now and then, and advising readers to avoid properly made copper is a good example.
Copper, cast iron, carbon steel — these are materials that have proven their worth for a very long time.