Odd lid underside

C

Chris M.

New member
I came across a cast iron casserole at my local thrift store (a not uncommon occurrence). I did some research, and It seems to be fairly typical, marked "Made in USA:, so post 1960. "No. 8". "10 5/8 IN". Block letters. There is one difference I see. The inside of the lid does not have the basting spikes. Instead, it has dimples. See image below. Any insights appreciated. I do all the cooking in our house, and will be using this piece to cook with. I am not concerned with value, so much, as with identifying this feature. Of course, I will now be looking for other cast iron pieces.

Any advice appreciated!
 

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Birmingham Stove and Range (BSR) Century. What you have is called a Dutch oven. A place to view several pictures of BSR hollow ware is under the drop-down menu Collecting on the home page. Go to the menu item Identifying unmarked iron. They also have some lid pictures that are identical to yours. Sounds like you just got bit by the cast iron bug. Welcome to the club.
 
The Dutch Oven is in the oven, getting its final "baking". The piece was sprayed and left in a garbage bag for two days after each of three removals, clean off's, and re-application's of Easy Off HD. I did a final scrubbing, and had trouble in a couple of areas on the top of the lid. Looking back the the images when I first go the piece, there were some rust spots on the top of the lid. After the final cleaning, there were black blotches where the rust spots were. I scrubbed these areas quite thoroughly, but they would not come off. I considered a wire brush, but decided against it as it could mark the surface permanently.

Any thoughts?
Thanks.
Chris
 
From: https://www.castironcollector.com/cleaning.php

There will often be some dark stains left behind, either from spots where rust was once active or from a stubborn carbon wart, and that's not unusual. Again, don't use anything harsh to try to remove them or you risk damaging metal. And by damage, I mean the leaving of any kind of marks, either scraping, grinding, or even polishing swirl marks. The consensus among collectors, though, is it's normal to have some staining and cooking utensil marks on vintage cast iron because people didn't buy pans back-when to display, they bought them to use. You can try to remove or at least minimize residual stains by soaking the piece in a solution of 50/50 white vinegar and water for 30 minutes at a time, followed by a buffing with 0000 steel wool. Rinse thoroughly with plain water to neutralize the vinegar solution.

Never leave a piece in the vinegar solution for longer than 30 minutes.

An alternate method is to wet the piece and then apply white vinegar full strength with a sprayer bottle. Let stand a few minutes and scrub with a stainless steel scrubber or steel wool, again followed by a thorough rinsing.

Never leave a piece with full strength vinegar on it for longer than a few minutes.

With repeated cooking use, however, layers of new seasoning will continue to darken the piece, and any stains that did not yield to the vinegar treatment will blend in.
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I think I will leave it as is. It is clean, and cooling in the oven now. This is not a particularly old piece. The inside is very smooth, and it should make a good cooker, which was my intent.

Thanks for the info Doug. I'm going to look at a 10" Levcoware marked Japan, one marked Taiwan, and one simply marked Japan 10, tomorrow. I'll take a look tomorrow. Again, looking for a daily cooker. There is not much cookware be found locally, and shipping is just not not cost- effective. I'll keep looking locally, and may find something more collectable at some point.

Thanks,
Chris
 
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