Pan passion

It was back in 1961 when Jackie Kennedy was pictured buying a Tefal pan in a store in New York. She surely had been a pioneer in spreading French style in the United States, but her taste was more in line with haute couture rather than French cuisine. She was a fashion icon who appeared in Chanel tailored suits and who was unlikely to be pictured with a humble pan in her hand - her place was definitely not in the kitchen. That was the era of glamorous women like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly, not domestic goddesses. It was more the part of Julia Child to spread French tastes to the American public. The story goes back to 1954, when French inventor Marc Grégoire, thought about coating the ordinary aluminum pan to make it non-stick. That idea changed our vision of a pan forever: We got stuck to non-stick pans!

As anyone who owns a classic wok knows, seasoning a wok can be a nuisance if you're not accustomed to the process. I first learned how to season one through Chinese cookbooks, especially informative ones like the one by Yan Kit So. Then I witnessed the process in practice from my friend Fuchsia Dunlop, a foremost authority in Chinese cookery in Britain. When Fuchsia was showing me how to treat the pan, I remember vaguely that I had the feeling of de-ja-vu, as my aunts always did a similar thing to treat their pans. Years later when I was doing a research on the history of poppy cultivation in Turkey, I had a similar feeling. One poppy oil presser was showing me how to make an ordinary aluminum pan become a non-stick one with the aid of a coating by poppy oil. He repeatedly said, "Like Teflon." We were in a remote village in Afyon, practically in the middle of nowhere, and this man, thinking that as an urban lady I'd only understand what he means in...