I found a very old pot in my very old house. I suspect it to be carbon steel, for the following reasons:  It's rusty It's magnetic It looks a lot like the carbon steel pans that were stored with it, except it's the shape of a pot  I would like to use it for the same purposes one usually uses a pot: cooking rice, boiling water etc. I am wondering how that works though:  If I follow the same processes as with a carbon steel pan, I would always have a thin layer of oil on the walls and bottom. Can one cook rice or pasta in such a pot, with boiling water? If I season but I don't add a thin layer of oil everytime, I am afraid the pot will rust very quickly  Does anybody know how to use such a pot?  Side note on why: I am well aware that using another pot would be simpler. The reasons why I am asking this question are the following:  The goal is to use the pot over a wood fire. The aforementioned pot used to be used in such a setting, thus wouldn't be dirtied by doing so. Conversely I don't have other pots whose cleanliness I would be willing to sacrifice The goal is also to give a new life to this pot, which is probably a century old, and use it the same way the previous inhabitants of this house did More generally, I am interested to know how cumbersome it would be to use it  Thanks in advance for the help 
I am with Bon Appetit on this one, or even more extreme - I always pan-fry mushrooms on the highest heat setting. For me, the keys for nice, browned mushrooms on a domestic stove are:  Use very high heat, and preheat the pan before the first batch. Don't crowd the pan, make a single layer of mushrooms. Use a proper turning/stirring regime. That mostly includes to have the patience to wait for the mushrooms to brown well on one side before flipping them to another.  McGee's advice sounds intriguing, but note that he specifies  with dry heat  At least for me, that is incompatible with the "cooked slowly" suggestion. Whenever I try to pan fry mushrooms on medium or low heat, the water they exude stays around, instead of instantly evaporating the way it does on a hot pan. They just stew around in their own sauce, which makes them soggy, bland, rubbery, and prevents caramelization. I don't know why it works for McGee; it might be that he has some technique trick I don't know, or maybe he simply leaves mushrooms in a low oven overnight with the intention to produce a kind of undiluted stew, or even to process them further to something marmitey. But for pan-frying, I have never had success with medium or low temperatures. 