mindstalk | What killed pottage? (Reply)

In history, we find pottage, a one pot meal of grains, legumes, vegetables, etc. Probably the "stew" of Extruded Fantasy Product. Supposedly a staple for centuries of European history, if not elsewhere. Now nearly extinct, as a name if not actual meal.

It's not like we don't throw things together and boil them; there's lots of those, whether or not we call them "stew". Drawing on my parents' repertoire, there's beef stew, tomato meat sauce (two varieties), beef stroganoff, chicken coq au vin, among others; there's also various Thai curries, or Ethiopian dishes, among yet more. But what they usually don't have is cereal cooked in the dish (though potatoes might be); instead, the stew is served over or beside separately cooked pasta or rice, or with bread.

So, why? I guess the obvious answer is that we can separate them easily. We have multiple gas or electric burners (or rice cookers). We have cheap factory-made pasta, or cheap rice, or cheap bread from the grocery store. So we can cook cereals without cooking whole grains for an hour, or grinding and baking flour, or paying a miller and baker (and waiting for the baking). Very different from having a bushel of wheatberries (or rye, or barley), and maybe one hearth.

And I suppose that given the choice, most people prefer the texture or contrast of a freshly cooked grain product with the dish, rather than one large mash. I've been making my own pottages recently though, and I like it.

A different reason is that there's only so much pot and freezer capacity. Back in 2020 I experimented with "pasta cooked in meat sauce", and realized that it worked[1] for me then because I had access to a large Dutch oven, and was still willing to eat my way through it all quickly. But with my traditional smaller saucepans, the pot was full of tomatoes and beef and such; putting in pasta, which was cheap and quick to cook anyway, would have been a waste of pot volume. And of freezer space (my father would cook a large batch of sauce, then freeze a lot.)

I also wondered if we've simply changed the name, e.g. to "one pot meal". However, when I searched, most of the recipes for those were "one pot" (and maybe a skillet) for the main dish, then still served over cereal product. Though this enchilada pasta is an exception, with pasta and canned beans all cooked together; pretty quickly, since it is just pasta and canned beans, not the brown rice and lentils combos I've been making.

[1] Well, fusilli/rotini worked. Macaroni/elbows probably would too. Spaghetti turned into giant clumps of pasta, blech.