dutch oven clout chasing
le creuset is my louis vuitton
Have you ever spent hours mesmerized by the Le Creuset website, caught in a daydream utopia where you design your own kitchen down to the color of the range hood and the enamel on the dutch oven?
No? Just me?
Regardless. Today’s newsletter is part cultural commentary, part shopping guide. It’s about the clout — and quality — of Le Creuset. It’s about why everyone should own a dutch oven and know how to use it. It’s about the kitchen as a place rife with highbrow/lowbrow aesthetic dissonance.
It begins, as so many stories do, with a targeted ad. “Introducing… Shallot” proclaimed the ad, the words framed around the image of a dutch oven in a neutral shade, a delicate cross between periwinkle and millennial pink.
This color hits right at the heart of my current taste — subtle enough to feel adult, pink enough to feel fun, and grey enough to feel androgynous, should I ever decide to share a kitchen with an adult male. It’s also precisely the color of a shallot, the most superior of alliums. A shallot will function superbly in place of any onion, garlic, or leek, and so of course the equally venerable, multi-purpose, and practical of cooking vessels should pay homage.
If I had a regular income, my first piece of Le Creuset cookware would be bouncing around the back of an 18-wheeler somewhere in middle America right now, destined for my grubby stovetop. (If anyone in my family thinks this is a hint to buy me a gift, please don’t. I’m not ready to commit to any Le Creuset color just yet, not even Shallot).
If you’ve made it this far and you’re wondering why I’m extolling this French cookware brand the way some women talk about Louis Vuitton, some history. Le Creuset has been making enameled cast iron pots and pans in a town in northern France called Fresnoy-le-Grand since 1925. These pots have been heavy, gorgeous, and enduring for nearly one century. Cooking icons like Elizabeth David and Julia Child adored them. You can even view Julia Child’s beloved Le Creuset dutch oven in the Smithsonian Museum of American History, should you be so inclined (hers was flame red, like all of the brand’s first dutch ovens). The company is sometimes credited with actually inventing and standardizing the dutch oven as we know it today (cocotte in French): a heavy pot with a wide surface area, tight-fitting lid, and handles.
A dutch oven is the most multipurpose of pots in a modern kitchen. It can be used for soups and strews, braises (with lid) or roasts (without lid) in the oven, stir fries, bread-baking, and even boiling pasta water, if you really need. It captures moisture beautifully with the lid on, retains and radiates heat evenly, and provides significant surface area for browning.
Of these, the Le Creuset dutch oven is the best you can buy: Not only because it performs all of these functions with perfection, but also because it will outlive you and stay beautiful doing it. The enamel on these pans is so chip-proof that the company offers a lifetime warranty, assuming you don’t commit a grand crime of cookware and deliberately hack at it with a knife. Every time I visit my parents, they still cook with the same hulking cerulean pot that has housed every stew, soup, and braise I ate as a child. The formulas that go into casting the iron and firing the enamel in Fresnoy-le-Grand are pretty much perfect.
If you aren’t persuaded by the history and the warranty, the Le Creuset version has by far the lightest weight of the dutch ovens, which, though I’m speculating, can probably be credited to that century of iron-casting experience. (Most cast iron pans today are significantly heavier than pans from the first half of the twentieth century, hence the craze for vintage cast iron. Many mysteries there, but a subject for a different newsletter).
Now that I’ve successfully led you to believe you should immediately purchase one of these miracles, I must tell you that a full-price 5.5 quart pot costs $420. Sometimes the sale prices go as low as $300-something, or even cheaper for the shallow/wide versions of the pan, but still. This is why I don’t own one yet, and why we are now entering the cultural commentary section of this newsletter.
My argument in favor of the cost: Whether you can afford it easily or whether the dutch oven is an investment, the heirloom nature of Le Creuset makes it a justifiable splurge no matter your financial situation. Everyone has to eat, should know how to cook, and deserves a pan that will last a lifetime. Passing down a pan through the generations isn’t highbrow behavior, making this dutch oven one of the few luxury goods that authentically eclipses its bougie status in terms of both actual value (it’s worth what you pay) and perception (it doesn’t come off as just for rich people). I love that about kitchens — what’s inside them can put us on neutral ground.
Yet Le Creuset also sells stoneware, teakettles, plates, mugs, and sundry assorted kitchenware — in the same exorbitant price range. You might notice I wrote that what’s inside kitchens can put us on neutral ground, not that it must. Owning Le Creuset plates and mugs is like owning Louis Vuitton or Chanel; sure, there’s superior quality, but you’re mostly paying to show other people that you have money. The $20 mug will break just like a $5 one, and there’s no lifetime warranty. The reality of a quality, beautiful piece of cookware blurs right into the fantasy of a kitchen where everything looks like art and matches exactly. In a daydreamy world, if my ideal kitchen features a dutch oven in shallot, why not the loaf pan, the pepper grinder, and the mugs to match?
Because in the real world, it’s stupid. And kind of gross. I’m only advocating you spend money on something so quality that you can also find it at Goodwill, on eBay, or even on the street. It should have the potential to endure fifty years of cooking and look nearly the same as when you bought it. And I’m not even suggesting you buy it now. Despite my obvious personal love, it still feels like something I need to wait for, save for, and earn. It’s the kind of pan you should buy yourself when you feel like a proper adult, or that someone should give you as a way of saying that you’ve become one.
If you don’t own any Dutch oven at all, there are plenty of other serviceable places to start. Staub sells a slightly cheaper competitor with fabulous colors and regular great discounts ($380 now, but often on sale), as does Milo ($145), Cuisinart ($100), and Lodge ($80). For true entry level, the Lodge Cast Iron Combo cooker was my first dutch oven, is my favorite of those I own, costs less than $50, and also functions as two cast iron skillets when you need, if you’re looking for something multipurpose and cheap. (It’s VERY heavy, however, if that might be an issue, and it’s also not enameled.)
If you are ready to spend some real money, or if you already own Le Creuset and want to initiate someone else to the cult, one final thought. The lifetime commitment price of Le Creuset has made it the apex of wedding registry gifts. Don’t wait until a wedding to ask for or gift one. A beautiful piece of cooking equipment shouldn’t be relegated to the realm of matrimony or solely to the ownership of married people. It’s silly to tie something we’ll all be doing for as long as we live to a hypothetical marriage that may or may not happen.
Restaurant notes this week
great tacos and margs: Cinco Soles. A new El Chucho competitor in Columbia Heights, on the same block. Eagerly awaiting the war between the two. Will meh El Chucho margs improve in response?
The strawberry-rhubarb newsletter teased last week is still forthcoming. Until then, it’s true strawberry season here in D.C. Make sure you buy some before we’re back to sad grocery-store strawbs!
Thanks for the guide. I can also give some recommendations about which dutch oven you should buy.
1) Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Signature Round Dutch Oven
2) Lodge Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Dutch Oven
3) Staub Round Cocotte
source: https://www.cookwaregurus.com/best-dutch-ovens-2024/