Frying Pan

History

Mesopotamian cooks already used copper frying pans ¹. The Greeks called theirs tēganon; the Romans had the patella and the sartago ¹. That Roman patella never really left the kitchen. It lives on in Spanish paella and Italian padella ¹. The English word "pan" comes from Old English panna ¹.

Non-stick is older than you think. At Cumae, near Naples, archaeologists found a dump of around 50,000 fragments of pots, pans and lids from the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius (27 BCE–37 CE). Many pans had a thick red coating inside to stop food sticking ³. These "pans from Cumae" sold across the Roman world, from Spain to Britain, and the Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria recommends them for chicken stew ³.

For centuries cooking happened on an open hearth, so pans grew legs. In America the three-legged frying pan was called a spider ¹. Spiders stood over a heap of coals raked onto the hearth, and wrought-iron ones from the 1700s and early 1800s often had hearts or punchwork on their handles ⁶. When enclosed kitchen stoves arrived in the mid-19th century, the legs came off and the flat-bottomed cast-iron skillet was born ¹². In the United States, Griswold (from 1865), Wagner (1891) and Lodge (1896) made the skillets many families still use ².

The next big shift came from a laboratory accident. In 1938 the DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a gas cylinder that should have been full and found a waxy white powder instead. It was slippery, resisted heat and almost nothing stuck to it ⁴. The new material, later sold as Teflon, went first to the Manhattan Project, not the kitchen ⁴. In France, the engineer Marc Grégoire found a way to bond it to aluminium. The best-known story says his wife, Colette, challenged him to coat a pan. He patented the method in 1954, and in 1956 the couple launched Tefal, which was selling three million items a year by 1960 ¹⁵. Cheap non-stick pans then pushed cast iron aside in the 1960s and 70s, until cooks rediscovered heavy iron pans in recent years ².