Rusted ding
It doesn’t look as durable as it is at first glance. Wafer thin, white, hollow thunk if you flick it, blue or red rim as a treat. Enamelware will stack into an ingot of solid steel if you let it, but most people don’t.
In practice, it is simultaneously durable and precious. It works great until you chip it, and then you it works just-okay until the bare metal rusts, and then you have a bit of an entropic disaster on your hands. I have still, after years of dealing with an enamel stock pot and dutch oven, not been able to tell whether I can still cook with them, even as I make rather a lot in them and presumably do not poison myself or my friends.
We forget that dutch ovens are enamelware. We remember that Falcon, the lead high-design brand for enamelware, is enamelware. It is associated with camping, with mid-aughts lumberjack chic, with ordering barbecue in the south at a place where you bus your own table. It doubles as cookware, serveware, and dinnerware, and there is a hierarchy here.
- It works best as cookware. The enamel coating keeps your piece from needing much cleaning or seasoning, so maintenance is pretty chill.
- Serveware is nice, too. Danish enamel milk pots, serve bowls, and platters work well with enamelware. But they conduct heat well, so you need to watch your handles & bottoms.
- Enamel dinnerware made sense at one point, but it feels like it might not now. There is not enough heft, it’s too aesthetically charged, and you’re not camping at home.
The problem with this hierarchy, combined with the somewhat fraught issues around durability, is that it takes a lot of work to decide whether an enamelware piece is worth owning at all. In most circumstances – dutch ovens & Danish milk pots being the primary exceptions – enamelware can always be replaced with something that looks nicer, works better, and lasts longer.
Enamelware resists posting, which is both blessing and curse. One used to post enamelware; one seldom posts enamelware now. It thrives in spaces that resist the sort of glam that posting requires. Now everywhere, in all forms, it is the new quotidian. For most people, it is a way of saying that you made a lot of money in tech before 2010 and never upgraded your kitchen. In restaurants, it’s a way of saying that you care about nothing but the food.
The signifiers mutate. In 10 years, I’ll write some text about enamelware and it will feel unrecognizable. Perhaps enamelware will come back. Perhaps it will change colors. (It’s done so before.) The object changes, the ritual stays the same.