It is wise before you start tossing stuff in any old pot to consider your options. Any investigation into the fine art if cast iron cookery will point you in the direction of Le Creuset’s $375 sacrebleu’d 101-year-warrantied French beauty. If you bought the first one in 1925 it would still be under warranty – until 2025. That is quite a serious piece of culinary cultural relevance right there.

I do not own a Le Creuset cast iron enameled Dutch oven. Mine cost only $48 and came through Amazon from a company called Lodge, an old-school cast iron manufacturer in Pittsburg, Tennessee. It has a lifetime warranty, beating the 101-year Le Creuset warranty, neither of which I would ever collect on no matter when I bought it. My grandmother left me a Lodge cast iron frying pan from the early 1900’s and my mother left one purchased in the 1940’s, most likely. I can attest to the ability of a Lodge to both sustain and possibly kill members of my family with equal proficiency depending on what’s cooking and how much fat is involved.

A Dutch oven recipe is ridiculously simple: Pour a cup of white wine over some raw chicken. Cheap wine is good. Cheap chicken is scary. So plurge on the chicken.

Chop up a handful of carrots and celery and a lemon or orange, your choice, and snug them all up beside the bird in a suitcase-packing arrangement. Thinly slice 4 garlic cloves and lay them on top with several sprigs of rosemary and thyme and couple of leaves of sage about the size of your ear. Salt and pepper to taste. I put in a little sugar just to make it a bit less healthy. If you are feeling adventurous, pour in some beer too. Why not? Put the heavy top on the thing and cook at 400º for about two and a half or three hours. That’s it.

During cooking, your house will smell better than your grandmother’s kitchen ever did. Open a window and neighbors and dogs and cats will be attracted. Since it is about 65º in January, I cracked the window and a cat is looking at me right now. Small children down the street will cry for their mamas, it smells so good. There is only one catch to this recipe: not many leftovers. It is simply that hard to stop eating it. And if any are left, it is wrong to not give some away.

Do beef brisket or pork loins or short ribs in one of these things and you will feel like Iron Chef Michael Symon in a full sweat. No matter what you cook, the results are always the same. It’s like a sad movie, you know up front it is going to be a tearjerker, and yet you still cry at the end.

My wife just walked by and read that and said my analogy makes no sense whatsoever, but I am still under the influence of the Dutch oven chicken so that is my excuse. I may cry right now, in fact – there is nothing left.