658 Hmmm, smells like apple pie, he said

Maybe it smelled like apple pie, but it looked like sewage from the bottom of a broken garbage disposal. This morning I decided to slice and cook some withered, soft apples. So I put a bit of margarine in the cast iron skillet and sliced the apples into it. But they were dry, so I added a bit if apple cider. Then I got really creative and sprinkled over it some cinnamon and old fashioned oats. It was smelling quite lovely, so I decided to add some walnuts. The whole mess turned charcoal black.

After I threw it out, I decided to turn the kitchen into a chemistry lab. I heated up a bit of apple cider in the cast iron skillet and added walnuts. Turned the liquid black. Then I put some apple cider in a stainless steel saucepan and added walnuts. Turned darker brown, but not black. Then I took that brown mixture and added it to a different, smaller cast iron skillet, one with more baked on black gunk (I like to call it seasoning). No change. Then I moved it to the other cast iron skillet, which probably needs to be reseasoned, and it immediately turned black.

From the kitchen I went to Google, and tried all manner of combinations, finding lots of recipes that use both cider and walnuts, and lots of advice on how to properly season a cast iron skillet (this one is 45 years old). But nothing about turning out a black porridge that looks like I scraped it off the garage floor at the end of winter in Ohio.

So if anyone with more lab experience or more cooking experience knows why an improperly seasoned cast iron skillet turns cider black when walnuts are added, I'd like to know about it. Just don't ever try this unless you've got a lot of extra ingredients so you can start over.