this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
793 points (95.8% liked)
Greentext
4393 readers
613 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah I am English. I would never call a cake tin a cake pan. Same with a roasting tray is never called a roasting pan. For it to be a pan it has to go on a hob. Even the way you describe things like a sauce pan seems contradictory, by your definition it should be a pot rather than a pan. It's interesting to note what local differences exist in the use of language.
You definitely can do high heat cooking in a pot. Most of them are stainless steel or cast iron after all, the material doesn't care.
Edit: forgot to mention that you can also have oven trays, which are flatter than a roasting tray. Roasting tray would be for say roasting potatoes or meat with sauce, and a tray would be for pizza or flatbread or chips.
Sure, but most of the time when you're doing high-heat cooking you're not using a lot of liquid so a pan with its shallow sides makes it easier to get a spatula or tongs in to move things around. The high sides are only useful when you want to heat a large volume of stuff. Typically that means you're using a water-based liquid (even something like a tomato sauce is mostly water based), so the heat will be at most 100C.
I suspect the British version of "pan" including what I'd call a pot must be from after North American English and British English diverged. The etymology of pan says that it has referred to a shallow thing since even before ancient Greek:
I guess the North American English dialects kept this meaning of a shallow thing, whereas British English focused on whether or not it goes on a burner (which apparently you call a hob).
I've heard differing interpretations even in england. According to my dad for example a pot is made of ceramic, so if it's made of stainless steel it's a pan.