Antique and Vintage Griswold Cookware

We are a part of eBay Affiliate Network, and if you make a purchase through the links on our site we earn affiliate commission.
For many cooks, the perfect pan for frying up a mess of pork chops, a rasher of bacon, or half a dozen scrambled eggs is an old cast-iron skillet. In particular, choosy cooks look for vintage skillets made by the Griswold Manufacturing Company of...
Continue reading
For many cooks, the perfect pan for frying up a mess of pork chops, a rasher of bacon, or half a dozen scrambled eggs is an old cast-iron skillet. In particular, choosy cooks look for vintage skillets made by the Griswold Manufacturing Company of Erie, Pennsylvania. The best Griswold skillets for cooking, as well as for collecting, were produced from the late 19th century until the beginning of World War II. If you plan to cook with your skillet, don’t worry too much about the design of the Griswold logos on the bottom of the pan, which can greatly affect the price, and focus instead on the pan’s cooking surface, which should be jet black and smooth as silk. One of the most respected cookware manufacturers in U.S. history, Griswold Manufacturing Company was founded in 1865 as Seldon-Griswold Manufacturing Company by a scion of Connecticut politics named Matthew Griswold and his Pennsylvania cousins Samuel and J.C. Seldon. By 1868, Seldon & Griswold was producing cast-iron hardware products for the home, from door hinges and stove dampers to waffle irons and spittoons. Skillets, the cast-iron cookware for which Griswold would become most famous, were not added to the company’s product list until the early 1870s. These earliest skillets were stamped with the word ERIE on the bottom, and were lighter than the cast-iron skillets Griswold would make decades later, which makes them especially prized by cooks today as they are easier to handle. In 1874, Griswold began to combine its stamped ERIE brand on the bottom of its pans with a raised decoration of a spider laying in wait in its web, the word ERIE repeated on the arachnid’s back. These spiderweb skillets were only produced until 1905, which makes them rare compared to skillets bearing the Griswold cross-and-circles logos that followed in 1897. In addition, the fact that the design was raised rather than stamped makes the task of finding one in good condition all the more difficult—a raised design on the...
Continue reading

Best of the Web

Tupper Diva
Kristian McManus’ fresh, airtight collection of Tupperware catalogs and related ephemera from...
Feeding America
This archive of 76 influential American cookbooks from the late 1700s to early 1900s, assembled...
Newest

Best of the Web

Tupper Diva
Kristian McManus’ fresh, airtight collection of Tupperware catalogs and related ephemera from...
Feeding America
This archive of 76 influential American cookbooks from the late 1700s to early 1900s, assembled...