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I am not, by any standard, a neat person. I try to corral my chaos into various acceptable containers—junk drawer, closet, under the bed, giant plastic tubs of doom—and when guests come over, maintain the illusion that I have a handle on my life. I’m not a slob, but I am a maximalist, and my whole life, I have felt deep shame about it. Particularly when it comes to my kitchen.
I am a food writer and I love having people over to eat dinner, so my friends and acquaintances see a fair amount of my kitchen. And until pretty recently, that kitchen was the size of a tiny closet in a Brooklyn apartment, where I have stuffed all my equipment and various salts. I use sheet pans for everything: spare counter space, serving dishes, places to organize my ingredients. And as a result, they are far from sparkling silver.
No matter how much I scrub at them, no matter what method—baking soda and vinegar, Bar Keepers Friend, industrial-grade oven cleaner—they accumulate along with the telltale grime of use at the corners. Every time a new article pops up with a brilliant, no-fail cleaning method for making baking sheets look brand new, I click. And every single time, my baking sheets, though perfectly clean, would not look anything like new. They look used because I use them.
Aside from throwing out my sheet pans every six months, a practice that seems environmentally catastrophic, expensive, and just plain silly, there is not a great solution. So this is what I have learned to do: Make peace with your sheet pans. Make peace with your well-loved Dutch Oven and your scratched utensils. Maybe it’s fine for things not to look brand new out of the box when, in fact, you use them to make meals every week. I promise you that in the back of every incredibly fancy restaurant on earth, there is a share of dinged-up pots and spattered sheet pans, well-used knives and stained kitchen towels. They're all perfectly clean and functional, but they just have acquired the aesthetic of wear and tear. (Plus, food photographers and stylists tell me, used and dented sheet pans make for the most gorgeous backdrops.)
We are, as Americans in 2022, generally positioned to appreciate novelty over maintenance, new things over old ones. Who could blame us? Social media and advertising continues to pump out images of beautiful, impossible Nancy Meyers-esque kitchens, full of glinting copper pots and double-wide countertops. People in Silicon Valley keep accidentally inventing the bus over and over. I keep putting caftans in my cart even though I have a closet full of perfectly serviceable caftans.
That’s something that’s hard to change in a sweeping structural sense. But in a small way, in my own kitchen, I have come to appreciate equipment that shows the marks of use. Yeah, this sheet pan might have marks I can’t get out, and it also was the receptacle of a sheet cake I made to surprise a neighbor. Sure, this pan has a few scratches and imperfections in it, but I still use it to cook eggs every morning.
Some kitchen items are appreciated with age—cast-iron pans, that comfy wooden spoon that you slowly break in until it fits your hand just-so. Every item in my kitchen has a story because I use it. It’s my kitchen, not an anonymous, perfect, glossy Instagram one. My kitchen towels have stains on them from sopping up sauces and averting curry catastrophes. My old, spattered, inherited Dutch oven has spots that won’t come off for love nor money, but it still bakes an incredible loaf of bread. The pastry cutter my dad gave me is slightly bent from over-enthusiastic biscuit making. Who cares? I’m going to keep trying to keep things as clean as I can, but I'm going to let go of that shame. My sheet pans are perfectly good as they are. So are yours.
Written by: Margaret Eby
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15 Comments
I assumed it should look new, so that was what I did.
He then had me make a pizza in the shiny pan and one in a blackened pan.
It was immediately obvious that the pans should be clean and sanitary, but not shiny.
While I usually use parchment in my sheet pans, it’s for convenience, not to keep them clean.
On the other hand I have a crappy supermarket pan for blasting things in the broiler. It's got a glossy non-stick layer of about 10 years of black, polymerized vegetable fats on it so that's my go-to when I carbonize stuff.
I'm on both sides of the debate.
The hed creates the expectation that the piece is satire, or someone has a really out-there opinion, the latter being a possibility when a few articles away in the rss feed is "I'm getting rid of all my dinnerware."
The misleading heds have popped up here on and off the entirety of the time I've visited the site. Another recent example: a decadent sounding hed about "4 Separate Pantries" being about someone who stores items in boxes in one pantry.
It's an annoyance to the reader, especially if the hed suggests information not included inside. But as I've commented before, it is also a disservice to the writers and writing, because it makes an otherwise good piece fail to live up to what the hed serves.
Likewise, regarding the other piece you mention: Colloquially, pantries can refer to the physical spaces themselves, but also the ingredients collected within. For someone who cooks many different types of cuisines and has several assemblages of ingredients in their arsenal, I think this is appropriate.
And aside from all this, at the end of the day, headlines are meant to intrigue and draw people in, while giving just a snapshot of the content inside. To me, this headline achieves that that. If we used full and literal descriptors for headlines, I don't imagine anyone would feel compelled to read any more of what we have to offer. Just my two cents.
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