By Brittany
There is not a facet of food that does not fascinate me. I love the ideology of food. I love that food speaks to trends and movements and moments. I’m not sure how you spent your lockdown time, but I spent mine thinking about foods that have fallen out of trend and in fact, have become the enemy of trendy moms and would-be influencers and those ubiquitous ones that the masses would deem “cool.” One of the most obvious offenders of the enemy food club that I found was the casserole.
In the Dark Days of early lockdown, I stumbled upon a 2013 article from The Houston Press wherein two of their staff made arguments for and against the casserole. The con-side arguer was Kaitlin Steinberg, the food critic for the Press at the time of publication (Steinberg has since moved on). Some notable comments from Steinberg: “I grew up in a small family of healthy gourmet cooks who never saw the need to make anything large enough to fit in a 9-by-13-inch baking pan, aside from the occasional cake”; “I prefer my food fresh and demonstrative of its own unique flavor, thank you very much.” I do not know Kaitlin Steinberg. I had never heard of her before I read this article in March 2020. At that time, I hadn’t had a true casserole in over a year. I love the challenge and satisfaction of complicated cooking and baking. I love international food. I don’t have a single reason to defend canned condensed soups. But in that moment, I was the casserole’s burliest bodyguard. I was the muscle of casserole mafia ready to kneecap Kaitlin Steinberg for running her mouth. I was Mel Gibson in The Patriot when he took Old Glory out of that one retreating guy’s hand and urged everyone to run toward the British forces. I would shut the mouths of the casserole naysayers. It was the strangest reaction because I am not an habitual casserole eater. But there was this innate sense of outrage that one would feel when they hear their old friend whom they haven’t spoken to in years get dragged by someone. The casserole needed me, and I was ready to answer the call.
Many other things happened in that moment. I remembered the casseroles of my childhood. I remembered the casseroles that I had at my family supper table, the casseroles that I had at church potlucks (I’ll boldly choose not to quote Steinberg’s gross potluck remark but you should check the linked article to see it). All of these memories were fond, and not one of them brought me to a place of reproach because I didn’t have my nutrition wheel represented on my plate. Instead, the memories brought me to a lovely place of warmth, comfort, and melted cheese. I had not called these memories up in years. Simultaneously, I had the urge to make casseroles. Like a madwoman, I began scouring the internet for recipes. I also felt the need to understand the casserole. Why had it once been in fashion only to have fallen out? How did I miss the falling out? How did I miss that it was even in a position at one time to even fall out? To say that it was existential wouldn’t be stretch.
I began my search in the place I generally start: etymology. From whence did this word emerge? What does the root mean? Is it something charming? Is it something ruefully on the nose? To my delight, the origin of the word is about as welcoming and lovely as I could have hoped. The earliest form of our word casserole derives from a Provençal French word casse, meaning “ladle,” and the Medieval Latin cattia, meaning “ladle and pan.” The root of the word itself is an invitation to dip in and serve. And truly, that is the beauty of the casserole. It’s a veritable pool for everyone at the table to dive in and share. It’s melty, it’s bubbly, it’s hot, its surface is begging to be pierced and its bounty excavated. It’s community sharing a feeling and a moment and a meal.
There are few things in life more lovely than sitting at a table with people we love. It’s a sacred thing to share space with people. Fewer experiences are more enjoyable to share than eating food that makes you happy. It’s like being at a concert with 60,000 people all screaming the same lyrics in unison. Those feelings of shared experience that border on euphoria or that make you stop and look at your surroundings, taking everything in and wishing it were possible to bottle a moment and a feeling. That’s the feeling I get when I sit at a table with people I love. And the food is such an integral part of the experience. When I think about the origins of the casserole, this image of a dish of community, it baffles me afresh as to why someone would turn his nose up and scoff at it.
And so it brings us back to the original question: What caused the casserole to suffer such a fall?
I would posit that the scope and reach of opinions via the proverbial highways of the internet didn’t help the poor casserole. As you’ll see in the accompanying images, casseroles just don’t photograph well. They just don’t. I remember an old episode of America’s Next Top Model where Tyra told one of the girls that her biggest strength as a model was that her face was too interesting to photograph well. Her angles were too acute and her proportions too exaggerated for a camera lens to understand. Maybe that’s the casserole. It’s not going to be sexy like a bowl of colorful fruit or lusty like a bar of melted raclette being slowly poured over pasta or primal like a tomahawk ribeye on a slab of wood being salted by a mustachioed Lothario. The eyes of the internet age crave beauty and pop. Internet culture has conditioned us to search for beauty before we search for substance. Substance is a byproduct. But at its core, the difficult-to-photograph casserole is all about substance. Beyond even its literal contents, the casserole and what it represents calls to an experience that is full of substance and resistant of shallow back and forth. The casserole looks like making the intentional choice to cook, sit down together, and eat slowly (lest you burn your tongue to oblivion with the magma-force heat); it’s an intentional time to invite conversation and comfort and ease. The casserole is not beautiful; the casserole makes way for the beauty to sit down at the table as well.
