My Casserole Restaurant Menu

I like casseroles so much that I once thought it would be a good idea to open a casserole-only restaurant. (Name: “It’s how we ‘role”.) It would include stews and hodgepodge dishes, perhaps even olio, gallimaufry and ragout. Some ideas are best left as ideas.

But I do like casseroles. Yet I was a little surprised to find out that the word casserole refers primarily to the covered baking dish in which they are cooked. It was not until about 1930 that the word was used to describe what is cooked in the dish, perhaps as haute cuisine flourished and used phrases such as en casserole, or à la casserole.

Casseroles as a word came to English in 1706 from the French word from the 16^th century that described a sauce pan. The Middle French word for pan (used as early as the 14^th century) was casse, and came from the Provenҫal  word cassa, which meant “melting pan,” which they got from the Medieval Latin word for pan, cattia. It is possible that Latin got cattia from the Greek word kyathion, which is a diminutive of their word for the “cup for the wine bowl”, kyathos.

While in my mind a casserole is a hodgepodge of ingredients, it can be more simple than a hodgepodge.

A hodgepodge is defined as a heterogeneous (dissimilar – wait until next week’s post) mixture, or a thick soup made from meat and vegetables. I don’t know about the heterogeneous aspect, but  knowing that hodgepodge began by describing “a kind of stew…made with goose, herbs, spices, wine, and other ingredients” certainly makes it deserving of a place in my restaurant menu. Goose stew.

The word hodgepodge (also found as two words or hyphenated between the syllables) came into English in the early 1400s as hogpoch, which was an alteration of the word hotchpotch that appeared in the late 1300s. At that time it was an Anglo-French legal term meaning “collection of property in a common ‘pot’ before dividing it equally,” a word derived from the Old French word hochepot that meant stew or soup.

Another item on the menu would be gallimaufry. It is defined as “a hodgepodge,” meaning a jumble or confused medley (more on this, too, in next week’s post), a ragout or hash. Gallimaufry has been used in English since the 1550s, having come across the channel from France, where it was spelled galimafrée. In Old French it was spelled calimafree, and since the late 1300s had referred to a “sauce made of mustard, ginger, and vinegar; a stew of carp.” Where that came from is open to debate. Carp stew with mustard/ginger sauce – comin’ right up.

Ragout (still pronounced in the French manner as ra-goo) is defined as a highly seasoned stew of meat or fish, with or without vegetables. Another dictionary allows poultry to be an ingredient, so add chicken ragout to the menu. Ragout has been used in English since the 1650s, and came from the French word ragoût, a form of the Middle French word  ragoûter, that meant ”awaken the appetite.” 

Hash has developed a déclassé connotation of diner fare about it, but the word refers more to the preparation of the food than the other words do. There is an element of cutting into small pieces rather than just mixing disparate ingredients. Defined primarily as “a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef and veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan” or “meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy”,  we have another menu item – veal hash.

Hash came to English first as a verb (also in the 1650s) to describe the hacking or chopping of food into small pieces. The French word for chop up is hacher, from the Old French word for ax, hache (more on this in a future post, or I’ll never finish my menu).  The noun (the food, not the method of preparation) came into use about a decade later.  

One final item on the menu, a word much used in crosswords. Olio is a dish of many ingredients, and is not a misspelling of oleo. (See why we have so many “follow up” posts?) It, too, is defined as a mixture of heterogeneous elements, a hodgepodge, but it is also used informally to describe olla podrida, a spicy Spanish stew comprised often of sausage, chickpeas, tomatoes and other vegetables. Known on the Iberian peninsula since the 1640s, the word comes from the Spanish (olla) or Portuguese (olha) word for pot or jar. The Spanish and Portuguese got their word from the Latin word olla. Like casserole, its meaning transferred from the cooking vessel to the food itself. And we’ve come full circle.

Of course, the dessert menu would have to include zabaglione.