A MetaFilter post reminded me of the odd regional term hotdish, which refers to what most Americans would call a casserole; according to this CBS News explainer:
“To try to put a boundary around hotdish is a losing battle,” said Tracey Deustch [sic; s/b Deutsch], a professor of food history at the University of Minnesota. She pointed out that virtually all hotdishes are casseroles, but probably not all casseroles are hotdishes.
Casseroles became popular in the United States during the 1920. They were made possible by the advent of the self-regulating oven, according to Megan Elias, a professor of gastronomy at Boston University. This was also around the time canned goods were becoming more accessible. […] Casseroles could be used to stretch leftover meat, which was especially important during the Great Depression and World War II. Tater tots, though, were not a staple of casseroles — or hotdish — until much later. Ore-Ida came up with the tater tot in the 1950s as a way to sell potato scraps. According to Deutsch, the product did not sell well at first, so Ore-Ida decided to market it as toppings for casserole.
Hotdish is common terminology in western Wisconsin and Minnesota, while casserole is the preferred name everywhere else in the country. The story behind that is still a mystery, at least according to Deutsch, Elias and Ann Burckhardt, author of Hot Dish Heaven. What is known, though, is that the term “hotdish” first appeared in a 1930 Mankato cookbook, published by Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid. “What’s clearer is that the dish has become a symbol of Minnesotan identity,” [Deutsch] said. “That is exactly why there are so many debates over what a hotdish can be.”
The OED created an entry last year:
U.S. regional (Midwest).
An oven-baked casserole; often with preceding modifying word indicating a principal ingredient, as in hamburger hotdish, tater tot hotdish, tuna hotdish, etc.
1930 Hot Dish. Fry two pounds of hamburger. Fry, but not till brown, two large onions… Stir all together and add enough water so liquid covers all, bake.
Cook Book (Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid: Mankato, Minnesota) 491937 Sadie Heth’s recipe for hot-dish can’t be improved upon.
La Crosse (Wisconsin) Tribune 27 April 11/5
[…]1979 This delicious hamburger hotdish has a meat sauce covering a cheese layer and noodles.
Minneapolis Tribune 12 April (Food section) 8/21993 Hot daily specials such as meatballs, roast beef, and chow mein hotdish.
J. R. Stuttgen, Cafe Wisconsin iv. 83
[…]2016 If you took a poll of Minnesotans to ask what their favorite hotdish is, I think a version of this ground-beef-and-tater-tot dish would come out on top.
T. Marrone, Dishing up Minnesota ii. 83
I like the fact that the first three citations show beautifully the classic progression from two words to hyphenated word to single word. I was bemused by the fact that when I searched my Gmail for hotdish it served me up e-mails with casserole. And I was amused by this comment from the MeFi thread:
On an unrelated note, my wife didn’t know tater tots were a real thing until we went to an American chain restaurant on the weekend that recently moved to Canada and they were on the menu. She thought they were a made up food for tv shows or something.
My meager credentials for the following speculation are, in chronologically order,
Wisconsin birth, and dozens of business trips to the land of shovel and swat (MinnySnowplace).
Might hot dish be a translation from a northern European language?
I wonder what sort of casseroles are not hotdishes. Ones that are too fancy?
I once had a variety of hotdish known as Mormon Funeral Potatoes. It was tasty and filling and shamelessly full of every kind of bad for you, thus providing for future funerals.
I hate to say it, but damn, those Mormon Funeral Potatoes look good. Save me a place at the next interment!
cuchuflete: Might hot dish be a translation from a northern European language?
Maybe. Norw. varmrett means “hot dish served as part of a meal”. Kantina har gjerne en eller to varmretter til lunsj. “The cafeteria usually serves one or two hot dishes for lunch”. I guess the modern American meaning could have been lifted from e.g. How to make a tasty hotdish out of your leftovers?
I see at Y’s link, a related portmanteau: ‘potluck’ (dinner). Wiktionary ref the applicable sense:
I’d say that sense isn’t (or wasn’t) current in Brit-land: it was new to me on arriving in NZ.
I often thought potluck ‘(North American English) a meal to which each guest brings some food’ sounded like it might be an eggcorn of potlatch ‘Northwestern US : a social event or celebration’. But Thomas Nashe used pot-lucke, and he knew small Chinook Jargon and less Nootka
I’ve noticed, though, that there can be as much excess at a potluck as at a potlatch (not that I’ve ever been to a potlatch).
DARE’s assessment of regional spread may be based on fieldwork from many decades ago and thus have been long since overtaken by events. I grew up in one of the Mid-Atlantic states and have lived most of my adult life in New York, and “potluck” doesn’t sound the least bit odd to me. Moreover, the various regional-or-other-niche synonyms offered in the wikipedia article are all ones that I can’t recall hearing personally. So if a “potluck” was ever described by some other word or phase in the Mid-Atl./N.Y. region(s) that alternative has become obsolete and/or was not included on that wiki list and thus had no chance to jog my memory.
“Covered-dish supper” is the term used for such events held in church social halls when I was growing up in southern Virginia. I don’t think that would be applied to a party at someone’s house, as “potluck” usually is.
One other usage note: my paternal grandmother was born and raised in Minnesota. By the time I came along she had been gone from there (instead living just outside of Pittsburgh) for about three decades, but still had a Minnesota accent rather than a Western Pa. one and more to the point did use some old-timey lexical regionalisms that I think were more characteristic of Minn. than W. Pa., like “davenport” for couch/sofa. So FWIW I have zero recollection of her ever saying “hotdish” for “casserole” even though she definitely cooked and served casseroles when we were visiting at her house. I can’t be 100% certain I would recall all these years later if she had, of course, but you would think it would have been at least as odd/noteworthy as the “davenport” usage that I do recall. One possibility that she moved out of Minnesota (1935ish?) soon enough after the first written attestation of “hotdish” as referenced above that it was not yet so common/dominant a lexeme out there as to have entered her personal lexicon and have been carried with her into diaspora.
Can’t believe OED truncates that 1930 hotdish recipe. It probably isn’t very long. Print the whole thing, cowards!
Potluck in the sense of ‘dining on whatever food is around’ goes back to 1592, per the OED. The sense of a communal meal where everyone brings something is American. The OED cites the NYT of Aug. 13, 1867, “Simple mechanics, thinking of nought beyond their wages, their pot-luck and their ponies”, but that seems uncertain to me. The next reference, clearly with the modern meaning, is from 1924.
For the older usage, I often see the verb take + potluck (Defoe, Wodehouse), which is odd to me. Where else is “take” used for eating?
“take one’s meals/dinner/tea/supper” is common
I’ve always interpreted “take” in “take potluck” as meaning accept, not eat. You’ll take whatever you get.
I’ve always interpreted “take” in “take potluck” as meaning accept, not eat.
Same here.
Which reminds me, I like using “take” in the sense “subscribe to,” even though it’s not part of my inherited vocabulary — it feels comfortably old-fashioned. OED (revised 2015):
“Protestant women may take the pill. Roman Catholic women must keep taking The Tablet” — Irene Thomas, 1990
I was a pretty studious kid, I like to think, but I took the Beano, not the Eagle. So there.
In central Iowa, in the 2010s, “hotdish” was specifically a version of funeral potatoes, and no other kind of casserole, which was a larger category. The term “funeral potatoes” was never used, and why would it be, since the dish was called “hotdish”.
I was once at a pary where I heard a discussion of whether a true hotdish was prepared in an oval as opposed to rectangular dish, possibly a micro-regional micro-distinction.
I wonder what sort of casseroles are not hotdishes. Ones that are too fancy?
Too colorful? I remember a friend from St. Paul, in the ’80s, mentioning “hot dish” and saying Minnesota had a lot of varieties of beige food.
Those funeral potatoes seem to have a lot of ingredients in common with the twice-baked potatoes of my youth. Could they be descended from an unattested “Proto-Cheesy-Potato” recipe?
What we need is a Sumerian version of the Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid Cook Book.
cuchuflete: Might hot dish be a translation from a northern European language?
Maybe. Norw. varmrett means “hot dish served as part of a meal”.
Interesting! Googling this, it seems that Upper Midwestern hotdish is in fact usually explained as a calque on Norwegian varmrett and Swedish varmrätt. I wonder if there is a trace of any *warmdish in earlier Minnesota church cookbooks.
“Protestant women may take the pill. Roman Catholic women must keep taking The Tablet”
I don’t want to let this slip into the past without expressing my deep appreciation. I lol’d!
Norw. varmrett means “hot dish served as part of a meal”.
Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English dictionary actually defines varmrett as “hot dish.”
This has made me reflect that the range of generic casserole-type meals I was routinely served as a young child when Richard Nixon was president seem insofar as i can perceive from my own limited perceptions to have largely become extinct over the last half-century, at least in the sort of east-coast bourgeois suburban communities that if defined with some breadth capture both where I lived then and where I live now. I’m not sure the classic sort of casserole that used up odds and ends plus a can of condensed Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup is quite as extinct as e.g. jello molded with bits of canned fruit cocktail suspended in it like flies in amber (to take one delicacy of my childhood that my own children thought was fictitious when I told them about it …), but while we in my household do eat some dishes that are prepared by baking in the oven in an object much like what my mother used to make casseroles in, they are individual dishes and not understood as part of a generic category.
Which leads me in turn to wonder about the actual status of hot dish in actually-existing current Minnesota. Is it a thing that a significant number of currently-living Minnesotans cook for themselves with some frequency on ordinary occasions or is it a thing where Minnesotans over 50 have memories of being fed it in childhood and is understood as a regional signifier on top of a childhood-nostalgia thing? When then-Congressman Walz (now in the headlines for other reasons) won this contest a decade ago for hot dish recipes submitted by Minnesota elected officials, did he just pull out something he’d eaten at home for dinner on a random Thursday two months previously, or was it the equivalent of telling his staff to go get him an Authentic Traditional Folkloric Outfit because he had to appear at a Folkloric Event where that was the dress code?
jello molded with bits of canned fruit cocktail suspended in it like flies in amber
Aieee!! Why must you bring back those memories?!
For all you non-Americans shaking your heads, there are foods which are unquestionably American, but that even Americans find disturbing: this, for example.
For the worst of what the 20th century had to offer, after massacres and global warming, see The Gallery of Regrettable Foods. NSF Anywhere.
I’m just going to pretend I didn’t see that.
this, for example.
I can’t tell you how many NZ ‘home cookbook’ recipes use evap where Europeans would use cream or creme fraiche or yogurt — or even evap in salad dressing, presumably because decent oil wasn’t available.
So I suspect pre-war NZ was much like the mid-West. By now even the tiniest NZ town will have an espresso coffee machine. Do U.S. ‘Diners’ still have those glass coffee ‘carafes’ that have been stood warming for hours? Does this explain why Starbucks is so popular there, but not in NZ/Aus?
My family is mostly Minnesotan (though not of Scandinavian or German extraction) and my mom would make a hotdish of some persuasion with some regularity until I left for college in the 00s. I presume, but am not positive, my sisters had more variety as my mom’s financial outlook improved.
For what it’s worth, my 25 year old cousin prefers his lime jello with carrots (it’s a jello salad, after all)
For the worst of what the 20th century had to offer …
Hat had better avert his eyes again. A very 21st century offering for a traditional festival. I just don’t get why gweilo cheese is a thing in Taiwan when there’s such a wide choice of tasty foods. PizzaHut seems to go out of its way to serve up the worst, stringy, processed muck. As for whatever that pink goo might be … (allegedly something to do with strawberry).
AntC: Diners most definitely have pots of coffee. Traditionally cheap, weak, burnt coffee. The idea is that you can get your cup filled and refilled throughout the meal, along with your water, without you getting dangerously buzzed.
A lot of cafés have pre-made drip coffee In big dispensers. It’s cheaper and quicker than espresso drinks and is often pretty good.
Starbucks was the first large chain of coffeehouses, places were you go primarily to get coffee. It’s “popular”, as you say, for business reasons. Many malls might support 3 diffrent fast burger chains, but would not support more than one coffee shop, hence a monopoly is natural. Starbucks spread quickly and became it.
Many malls might support 3 diffrent fast burger chains, but would not support more than one coffee shop, hence a monopoly is natural.
Hmm. My city (popn ~400,000) has three Starbucks, one at each major mall. Each of those malls has at least three other coffee shops either within the precincts or immediately outside. Each of the smaller malls has at least two coffee shops (no Starbucks). Neither is there any Starbucks in the City centre/shopping area: because there’s too many coffee shops (six I regard as good enough to patronise). There’s a good smattering of up-market bars that’ll supply a decent espresso and/or good wine/beer at different times through the day. I’m not counting cheap’n’cheerful chains that’ll sell a sticky bun and (allegedly) espresso.
Traditionally cheap, weak, burnt coffee.
Yeah, NZ had a few of those when I first arrived in the ’90’s. More so in rural centres, where I guess they didn’t have the turnover to justify an espresso machine. Now all gone.
Coffee in Britain was still uniformly ghastly when I was last there (2010). Plenty of Starbucks and Starbucks-alike. Decent coffee you had to really go hunting for.
Flash: I finally got a burr grinder and my coffee is noticeably better.
Oh, the culprit here isn’t Type 2 Eagleland (…I see they’ve changed the name to something much less sciency…), it’s the 1960s and the 70s*. Those weren’t any easier on the senses in Europe – on either side of the Iron Curtain in fact.
* eine Epoche, die von brutaler Hässlichkeit geprägt war “an era characterized by brutal ugliness”
These recipes are not from the ’60s/’70s; those produced different kinds of scary food. These hideous recipes originate in the earlier 20th century.
Like Y said. I think these foods appealed to my parents’ generation, who lived through the Depression and the War (The War), when meat was a luxury or a treat.
…Ah. That’s what I get from being too cautious to click through.
Edit: nope, the beef fudge isn’t attested before 1967 – and the tester calls it delicious and says it’s actually better than the same fudge without the beef…
lime jello with carrots
That’s with grated carrot, as I recall (Luby’s Cafeteria every Sunday after church). It can be pleasant to look at. The combination of textures puts me off, though, as far as edibility goes. Squirrels too are pleasant to look at.
@DM: There are different things here. Jello molds and mayonnaise did come out of the early 20th century, when instant gelatine and refrigeration and canned everything were new and exciting and promoted by cookbooks published to advertise them. The novelties of the 1910s and 1920s were adapted for the frugal ’30s and ’40s, and then to the propsperous ’50s.
The beef fudge recipe is an original. I don’t know when it was invented, but surely long before the cookbook was published. Its author (per her obituary) was born in Oklahoma in 1920, and must have experienced the depression one way or another. However, living later on a cattle ranch in Montana would have made leftover beef a commonplace thing. In any event, the reckless combination of all these ingredients is classic Midwestern American tastes taken to their extreme and beyond.
In any case, fudge is specifically American. 🙂 Definitely Type 1 Eagleland, though!
Once in the US Army I was served lemon jello with chopped onions.
For those who have forgotten about this old post showing me staring down a savory jello salad, I’m linking to it again.
“Frankfurters take on new glamor in this gleaming aspic.” This is a Fallen World.
From linguistics to (my) table: My favorite example of phonological nativization, Da sky from MLG schy vel sim. ultimately La ius, is exactly that, jellied broth. But you’re supposed to use enough pork bone when cooking the broth that it will gel without further additives. (I have for many years been suppressing memories of that grandma dish par excellence, kødrand. But that used liberal amounts of husblas (fish gelatine) < MHG ~ ‘sturgeon bladder’).
(And when inherited directly from IE, more or less, it’s ost = ‘cheese’! PG *justaz would seem to have added something to PIE *yúHs, though).
Also. also, I never got anybody to offer an opinion on whether iūs would be [ju:s] or [iju:s]. Vox Latina was perused with no elucidation gained, but it seems that Pompeii was something like [pompeiji] or even [pompejiji] so an excrescent [j] in iūs doesn’t seem impossible.
@Lars: It has to be a monosyllable, or these dactyls won’t work:
Horace, Satires 2.8.45:
2.8.69:
(Wiktionary says “[i̯uːs̠]”. How can they tell a [i̯] from a [j]?)
FWIW, the 1960’s cookbook Let’s Eat Home Cooking, from St. Wenceslaus Parish in Spillville, Iowa (largely settled by German and Czech immigrants), features a section entitled “Meat, Fish and Hot Dishes” which includes several recipes described as “casserole”.
Minnesota ‘Hotdish’ spoken live on your TV just after 2:00. (And again with adverse comment on a recipe if you keep watching.)
@Y, thanks. Latin metre has always made my eyes glace over, I’m glad other people can use it to advantage.