A flat-bottomed pan with slanted sides, typically made of cast iron or other metals, used for frying and cooking food.
From Middle English 'skylet', possibly from Old French 'escuelette' meaning 'little dish', diminutive of 'escuelle' (bowl). The word has been used in English since the 14th century, originally referring to a small cooking vessel.
Cast iron skillets can last for generations and actually improve with age through 'seasoning' - a process where oil polymerizes to create a natural non-stick surface. Some families pass down skillets as heirlooms, with 100-year-old pans being more valuable than new ones!
Kitchen tools and cooking were coded as women's unpaid domestic labor; 'skillet' carries gendered assumptions about women's 'natural' role in food preparation, historically used to exclude women from professional culinary authority.
Use functionally; avoid gendered framing like 'skillet skills' as feminine virtue or domestic duty.
Women chefs (Alice Waters, Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse's contemporaries) fought for recognition in professional kitchens despite gendered gatekeeping.
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