A Love Letter to My Dutch Oven |
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Guest Essay
By Jenny Rosenstrach
Ms. Rosenstrach writes the newsletter Dinner: A Love Story on Substack.
I remember when we first met. It was 28 years ago, at the Bloomingdale’s flagship in New York. I was with my fiancé, Andy, clutching a wedding registry clipboard, bumbling my way around displays of crystal champagne glasses and platters and other fancy things that seemed to belong to some future fantasy self. I was 26 that year, living in a small Brooklyn fourth-floor walk-up, engaged to the guy I first noticed in my college Russian literature class.
And there it was, a beacon of orange amid the quicksilver saucepans and skillets: the round, enameled cast-iron five-and-a-half-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. I instantly knew we belonged together. Besides the fact that it was beautiful, it reminded me of my mom’s Dutch oven, the one that sat on the stovetop when I was growing up, loyally churning out beef stews and tomato sauces and other mainstays of a 1980s working mom’s repertoire. Her pot was oval and smaller, but it was the same color as the one in front of me, that signature Le Creuset “volcanique.” Mom bought hers in the early........