The polenta pan they sold me
Photo placeholder: the cast-iron polenta pan, possibly on a stove or with food in it.
I had a layover in Argentina and went looking for the kind of restaurant where the recommendation comes from someone who has actually eaten there twice. The dish I came for was polenta — proper Argentine polenta, which means cooked slow in a cast-iron pan that's been used for decades, served out of the same pan it was made in. I asked the waiter, then the cook, then the owner where the pan had come from. They told me.
Then I said the line you say when you mean it: I love this pan.
The owner disappeared for a few minutes and came back with the pan washed, dried, and wrapped in butcher paper. He named a price that wasn't really a price — more like the gesture of a price. I paid it. I carried the pan back to the hotel in my flight bag.
It came home in checked baggage, on the airline I work for, in a backpack I'd lined with a hoodie so it wouldn't bang around. It's at my house now. It cooks polenta the way it cooked the polenta I had in Argentina — slow, even, no scorching at the edges. I've made it on it dozens of times. I'm not entirely sure it's possible to make bad polenta in a pan that good.
The lesson, which is also the curation rule for this site: if you're somewhere and the thing in front of you is doing its job, ask where it came from. Sometimes you can buy it. Sometimes they'll sell it to you on the spot.