Hi Everybody,
It seems BCC/Hammersmith is now just Brooklyn Copper Cookware, and I called there to see if anyone remembered my case, or if it had come up again. I spoke to Mac, who did not remember my specific pan, but he said that he had seen this problem many times over the past 5 years. He did not want to guess how many, but in every case the pan was from Ross Dress 4 Less, Tuesday Morning, TJMaxx, or a few others. Mac had a little more information, so I thought I'd follow up on this thread. I think I took pretty good notes, but if you need more information call Mac (check the BCC website because their number is new) or your favorite retinner.
Mac is sure the bad pans are not from the real manufacturers. Apparently it's very easy to have a metal stamp made and to fake tags. But the real issue has to do with low-priced copper sold in Europe. Inexpensive already lined pans and handles are imported to France as separate pieces and riveted together in France. This allows them to be legally stamped "made in France". At some point some bad pans lined with lead-laced tin were imported, but they were caught containing lead so could not be sold in Europe. Rather than return them, somebody bought everything really cheap and riveted them with cheap aluminum rivets (first sign of fraud) and shipped them to the US. Aluminum looks like tin on the inside of the pan, but you can see aluminum on the handle side too, and good French manufacturers usually use copper rivets.
Mac said it makes sense that they got into the US easily, since customs sees copper cookware from France all the time. The importers sold the frauds wholesale through big conventions where buyers from discount stores buy. When they saw solid French copper for $20 (second fraud sign) they could sell for $40, they scooped it up. Mac said no one knows exactly where the bad pans came from, but in many places roofing tin (which has lead in it) is often sold as just tin, so it's probably somewhere with no tradition making copper cookware.
BTW, acid is used to break down old tin for retinning a copper pan, not necessarily to test for lead. When a real tinned pan is dipped in acid it turns one color, and when there is lead it turns another color. I'm not sure that was clear in my previous post?