[Sca-cooks] If you only had one cooking pot

[marilyn traber 011221]

> If this is cast iron, the stuff I'm talking about is really thin.  
> It's not significantly thicker than the metal the mild steel woks 
> are  made from, but it looks somehow a little duller, and as you say,
>  is a  lot more brittle. Maybe they get annealed when you cook with 
> them,  and are more delicate in shipping? And maybe they're so cheap 
> to make  there's an acceptable level of breakage? Who knows, maybe 
> they  recycle the shards.
> 
> Adamantius

Hmmm- hafta see it, I guess. Two further thoughts, though. One is that it may 
actually be pure iron, a material that's very popular in France for smiths, 
but which hasn't quite caught on here. It was actually not sold in the US for 
a while here because the company selling it couldn't make enough sales- my 
little stash of bar stock was purchased just before they went out of 
business. Pure iron, though, is very ductile- even more so than mild steel.

Second thought is that it just may be an oddly translated name, or an alloy 
with no carbon, but other alloying elements that may lead to its perceived 
brittleness.

Iron and steel go through an interesting set of name changes. Iron is iron 
when it has no carbon in it at all, then becomes steel when it has 1 0r 
2/100th of a percent carbon in it- it's then rated as 10xx, the xx being the 
numbers (from 00 to 99) that indicate how many hundredths of a percent of 
carbon is in it, for simple steels, meaning they contain only carbon and iron.

Cast iron has actually gone beyond the tool and other hard steels in terms of 
its carbon content- it has about 2% carbon, which is why it's so brittle.

Another possibility would be that it's pure iron that's been case hardened- 
in other words, a solid iron matrix in which just the very outside layer of 
it is iron infused.

Don't suppose you'd get one, and let me take a file, and perhaps a bench 
grinder to it, and let me find out, would you?

;-)