An 80 Year Old Chicken Fryer

    How the heck do I write a blog about cast iron pans that hasn't already been written? There are so many benefits to using cast iron (including but not limited to: the way they hold temperature, the versatility, the sustainability, etc.). I have several pans that are all 70 to 100 years old. They have lived through wars, depression/recession, that one dress picture that broke the internet and everything in-between. When I cook on these, I get to think about how once another family lived off of the food created within and I get to honor that by continuing to use this to make food for my family. So here is the story of my chicken fryer.

    About 2 months ago I saw an add for 4 cast iron pans all needing some TLC. There was another 10" pan, an egg pan (which we will definitely talk about later) and a chicken fryer w/ lid.  I snapped them up because I have never seen a chicken fryer for sale, be it new or old. The lady who sold it to me was in her 60s and she told me that from the time she was very little, this was the pan that her mother had used to fry chicken in and that she thought her mom easily fried over 1000 chickens in it. Her mother was older and no longer cooking, so these were no longer in use so she decided it was time for a new home. 

Chicken Fryer and Lid. 3 dots marking the pan. "8 1/2E" marking the lid.

    The first thing I wanted to do was identify the fryer. There are a bunch of resources for this online and I quickly came to learn that this was from a foundry called "Chicago Hardware Foundry" and was most likely made in the 1940s. The lid is really interesting because the raised ridges in the center are actually used to help return moisture that evaporates back into the cooking surface, effectively basting while the lid is on. You will also notice a lip around the edge of the bottom. Heat rings on cast iron pans are made to keep that heat under the surface the best it can. Some pans don't have these and some have it offset from the edge. 

    There was a large build up of seasoning, so I decided to strip it down using a lye bath. Lye breaks down the organic material on the surface of the pan and takes it back to the bare metal. At the time of writing this, I have not seasoned it because that involves taking my oven up high and it's already warm in my house so my wife likes to remind me that I don't need to make it any hotter. The picture above shows just how smooth the inside is, which speaks to the amount of use it has had.

    So that's my chicken fryer. I have been piling up recipes to try once it's seasoned and I am excited to share that once I have found something I like.

I'm Not Saying I'm a Trendsetter...

...But my parents sure were!

    My name is Treyson (sounds like Jason) and in this life I have met only 2 other people with that name. People butcher the pronunciation so frequently that I pretty much go by Trey-Sahn at this point. There are folks that I have professionally known for years that have never gotten it right. 

    A few years ago I was working with this Census dataset for a project which has a list of how many people were born in any year with any name. To show up on the list, there has to be 5 occurrences of that name. Everyone who knows me, knows I am going to say that the absolute best way to go through this is with Alteryx, so I am going to get to the point now, and then later I will show you how I did the analysis. 

According to this dataset, the very first year that there were more than 5 people born with the name Treyson was 1990. I was born in 1989.

If you look at the chart below (also made in Alteryx), you will see that the US hit peak Treysondom during the time I was at university (2008-2011) and we have had a slow decline since.

    So that's a fun thing. Data is great and you can learn a lot. What else do you need from me? Okay, now we are now going to look at the technique and why Alteryx is so good for these quick insights on a dataset like this one (100+ txt files).

    This is a high level overview. You can get a copy of my workflow here. Alteryx has the directory tool, which allows you to grab a list of all files in the directory. So once you have downloaded and unzipped the data from the census site above, you just have to point that tool to the newly exposed folder containing our text files. Dynamic Input, which is my favorite tool, allows you to query a bunch of files all at once, as long as they have the same structure. So all of these have 3 fields (name gender and count), which makes it really easy. I also bring in the file name so that we can grab the year that each record is coming from. Then we clean up some data points, creating dates from text, changing field types, etc. And then graph. You can download the workflow and follow along and even take a look at the popularity of your name or your kids names. This took like 5 minutes to create and 10 seconds to run. Super fun stuff.

What am I doing?

     I was sitting in my best friend's living room. The audience was me, my wife, my best friend and my best friend's wife. These are like 3 of my top 5 people here. My son is on the autistic spectrum and my friend's wife is a teacher so we were just talking about what this means and things that we see in our son and things that could develop or are developing in his personality and my friend just says, "I could see Moose (old nickname of mine) being somewhere on the spectrum". AND THEN EVERYONE AGREED WITH HIM. If you ever see me walking around looking sad it's because these are my friends. Now normally he is a big jerk and that's why we are such good friends, but this time he was serious and said that I have a tendency to dive into things obsessively. Which is not untrue...

    At one point in 2018 I owned like 19 cassette decks, which is 18 more than I really need at any point in time. I could tell you all the functions of each one and where it stood on the functionality spectrum when it was created (I was even going to make a youtube channel). Some people find that stuff interesting.

    I also used to run a blog around Analytics and cool things my team and I were doing in Alteryx (one of the things I have obsessed about), but that went defunct when I had kids. Recently my energy has been good because I am taking care of my body a little more than I have in the past few years. So I wanted to take some of these obsessions that I get into myself into and start writing about them again. In order to maybe get some of the creative energy out.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I am excited to take this journey!

-Treyson