Casserole

 The word “casserole” entered English from French in the early eighteenth century. It originally denoted a pan or cooking vessel; today it can mean either an ovenproof dish in which food is cooked and served or the food prepared in it.

Casserole Pixabay

Early English casseroles were very different from their modern namesakes. Eighteenth-century recipes used cooked rice to form an edible case that was filled with a savoury mixture.

In the United States, economical one-dish casseroles became increasingly popular during the Great Depression and World War II. Their popularity peaked in the 1950s, when home cooks combined convenient canned meats, fish, vegetables and condensed soups.

Tuna-noodle casserole predates the 1950s craze. One of its earliest known printed recipes, “Noodles and Tuna Fish en Casserole,” appeared in Sunset magazine in 1930 and was submitted by a reader from Kennewick, Washington.

Heat-resistant glass transformed casserole cookware. Corning Glass Works introduced Pyrex ovenware in 1915, and covered casserole dishes were among its first twelve consumer products.

In Minnesota and parts of the Upper Midwest, a casserole is commonly called a “hotdish.” What is believed to be the first printed hotdish recipe appeared in a 1930 cookbook produced by the Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid of Mankato.

Campbell’s home economist Dorcas Reilly created green bean casserole in the company’s New Jersey test kitchen in 1955. Originally called “Green Bean Bake,” it combined six ingredients, including condensed cream of mushroom soup and fried onions.

Reilly donated the original green bean casserole recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. A Campbell’s spokesperson said in 2015 that about 40 per cent of the company’s cream of mushroom soup sales went towards making the dish, now closely associated with Thanksgiving.

For the 1983 film Return of the Jedi, sound designer Ben Burtt augmented Jabba the Hutt’s voice and movements with wet, squelching noises made by working his hands through a bowl of his wife’s cheese casserole.

Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce; Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary; Oxford Reference; Library of Congress; TASTE; Smithsonian Magazine; CBS Minnesota; National Inventors Hall of Fame; Smithsonian Magazine; StarWars.com