NASHVILLE — The obsession started back in the fall, long before the coronavirus pandemic, when I bought a copy of Anne Byrn’s new cookbook, “Skillet Love,” to give to my brother-in-law, Harry, for Christmas. During his single years, Harry always spent the holidays with us, and he always made a happy fuss over my cornbread, which of course I make in a cast-iron skillet. (If you are making cornbread in anything other than a cast-iron skillet, stop right now.) Eventually Harry bought his own skillet and learned to make cornbread himself. Eventually, too, he remarried. I am not saying that good cornbread leads to marriage, but I’m not saying it doesn’t either.

Harry and Stephanie couldn’t come for Christmas this year, and I never got around to mailing their present. (“Never got around to” being code for “fell in love with that cookbook and decided to keep it.”) Ms. Byrn, a Nashville writer better known as the Cake Mix Doctor, is famous for shortcut cooking with laborious-looking results. I am not a person who normally finds it soothing to cook, and I like a shortcut almost as much as my mother did. (No one welcomed the advent of Hamburger Helper more than Olivia Renkl.) “Skillet Love” is a cookbook that makes getting supper on the table easy but doesn’t involve a flavor packet full of chemicals. Win-win.

Win-win-win, actually, for a cast-iron skillet used is a cast-iron skillet made better. The trick is to avoid cooking anything acidic in it, to wash it gently in lukewarm water — or better yet, to wipe it out using no water at all — and then to dry it with a lint-free rag. To prevent rust, rub a thin coat of oil into the pan before storing. The oil bonds to the iron when it’s heated, improving the pan’s easy-release layer with every use. Well-seasoned cast iron is of its very nature a nonstick pan.

I’d been gradually replacing all the chemically coated nonstick cookware in our kitchen for some time anyway, for both health and environmental reasons: The fumes from the chemical coating are so toxic they will kill pet birds (perhaps you’ve heard of the canary in the coal mine?), and those chemicals have helped to turn my beloved Tennessee River into one of the most polluted waterways in the world. A cast-iron skillet addresses both problems, and I had three of them in my cupboard.