Lasagna and Paella
when the dish names the dish
Look at the humble CHICKEN POT PIE, or savory POT ROAST. What do you notice? Somehow the cooking POT has managed to make its way onto the marquee. It’s reasonable to give the POT some credit, but there are many cases where the cookware takes over the food’s name entirely. As with the CASSEROLE, it tends to only happen after the entree’s popularity has caused it to totally usurped its namesake cookware.
The all-American CASSEROLE began as a baking dish for the oven, sometimes glass or enameled cast iron. Only later did it transform into an economical, easy-to-make entree. You’ll find vintage menus or old cookbooks with recipes for CHICKEN A LA CASSEROLE, more clearly describing a style of preparation with the dish ware. But as its popularity grew, those middle words were clipped to form the handier CHICKEN CASSEROLE. The CASSEROLE rose to become a mainstay at the American dinner table, and its origins as a baking dish faded in memory.
This has happened many, many times.
There’s the French CASSOULET, a hearty stew of sausage, duck confit, pork and beans, was also first a dish, one that happens to be perfect for cooking a hearty stew of sausage, duck confit, pork and beans. It too became a quintessential entree, a mainstay on French menus, and with that success CASSOULET the cooking dish fell to a distant second in the minds of most eaters. Ironically or not, both dish words CASSEROLE and CASSOULET come from the same source
.Go around the world, country by country, and you’ll find a dish that became a dish, often THE dish. In Spain, PAELLA began as a pan. The ocean of rice, vegetables, seafood or meat that began in Valencia grew to become the national dish, engulfed the pan and became the primary meaning of PAELLA.
It’s the same story with the delicious TAGINE of Morocco and North Africa. It was once just a flat, earthenware dish with a cute conical top, and now is the title of the famous regional stew that is slow-cooked within it. The flamboyantly Greek flaming cheese, SAGANAKI, steals its name from the copper pan beneath it. Even the iconic LASAGNA cribs its name from a cooking pot, and likely the one used to make it. In Latin America, the CAZUELA or cooking dish has been overtaken by regionally famous dishes in CHILE, PERU and COLUMBIA.
This crime occurs in French over and over. The origins for the TERRINE as a piece of earthenware are visible in its terrestrial name. Both the thick soup POTTAGE and slowly boiled meat and vegetables known as POT AU FEU or pot over the fire make no attempt to hide the POT that produced them. Remarkable if true, the same POT AU FEU or may have transformed into the compressed PHO, the iconic Vietnamese soup dish during the French occupation. Then there’s the very descriptive HOT POT of Chinese fame or the Japanese version NABEMONO, literally things in pot which is often shortened to NABE or POT.
Back home we can eagerly order a thick and creamy CHOWDER oblivious that it was a cooking pot and cousin to the CAULDRON before becoming a fish stew. Once you see CHICKEN A LA CASSEROLE turn into a CASSEROLE, it’s obvious how we created a bowl of CLAM CHOWDER.
Next time you are ordering breakfast at some diner, you’ll notice the waiter pass by with a scramble of eggs, bacon, hash browns and cheese in a cast iron pan that cooked it. You’ll look down on the menu to find it and see it’s called a SKILLET.