French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [38]
The heavy French cast-iron pot in the drawing is the prototype of the ancient oval faitout or cocotte.
French vitreous-enamelled cast-iron pots, made by the famous firms of Le Creuset and André of Cousances, are now imported in quantity and in a large range of sizes and shapes. They are widely distributed. So are the Belgian-manufactured equivalents, which go by the brand name of F. E.
Brise-flamme This is an asbestos or other mat which protects earthenware pots from a direct flame, enabling you to cook stews and so on very slowly on the top of the stove. A serviceable wire mat is made by the Dutch firm of Tomado. A far more satisfactory and correspondingly more expensive product is a French. device called a Cui-Doux. This is a round iron stand with a handle, upon which the cooking pot is raised above the source of heat. In effect, it is like the trivet used over an open fire.
Casserole Although this word has come to mean, in English, an earthenware or other oven dish in which foods are ‘casseroled,’ in France a casserole is simply what we call a saucepan, with high straight sides and a handle. Technically, this kind of saucepan is called a ‘casserole russe’; a shallow saucepan with straight sides is a sautoir, a sauteuse, a casserole à sauter, a casserole-sauteuse, or a plat à sauter; we have not even one word to describe this kind of pan, except possibly the term skillet which is beginning to come back here from the United States, where it migrated some hundreds of years ago. But in those days a skillet was an iron pan with three legs. An earthenware saucepan is a casserole en terre, but each variety has its own designation; e.g. a marmite en terre, a cocotte en terre, a terrine, a poëlon, a plat à gratin, a casserolette, a ramequin and so on. Many regional dishes also depend upon the local type of earthenware pot for their traditional manner of cooking and presentation. Among these are the cassole for the cassoulet of the Languedoc, the tian from Provence which has also given its name to the mixture of vegetables which is cooked in it, the toupin of the Béarn in which the garbure is cooked, the caquelon for a cheese fondue, the unglazed porous pot called a diable (left) for the cooking of potatoes and chestnuts without any liquid, and the huguenote, an earthenware baking-pan specially designed to accommodate a large goose or other long joint, although this term is also used to describe a round stew-pot or soup-pot.
Most French—and also Spanish, Italian and Greek—earthenware cooking pots are glazed inside but not outside and can be used on the hot plates of a solid fuel or a gas stove as well as in the oven, provided that they are treated with care. They were, after all, originally designed for cooking over charcoal or wood fuels which give out just as much heat as gas or bottled gas. For safety, however, most people prefer to stand earthenware casseroles on a mat or on a raised grid between the flame and the pot, although those who are careful always to let them heat very slowly but directly over a low flame will find this method just as satisfactory. One essential precaution is to heat any liquid—wine, water, stock,—to be added to vegetables or meat already fried or frying in an earthenware pot. Cold liquid poured into a hot, all but dry, earthenware vessel will almost certainly crack it, although the occasional faulty casserole is going to crack anyway whatever precautions are taken.
English earthenware or brownware cooking pots such