Casseroles have an image problem.
The word itself conjures canned cream of mushroom soup and fried onions, limp green beans and rubbery noodles, the stuff of uninspired potlucks and Grandma’s house.
This isn’t to say you don’t have a soft spot for a good homey casserole, perhaps a nostalgic tuna noodle number set out on the kitchen table.
But the coziness of the casserole may have eclipsed the culinary virtues of the dish, which is not dowdy in its DNA. It is not inherently bland or one-note. It does not have to contain even a single strand of melted cheese, or be dusted with crushed potato chips.
Quite the opposite. The casserole can be nuanced and urbane, with room for fresh ingredients, clever details and a vivid palette of flavors.
After all, there’s nothing wrong with baking assorted ingredients together in a dish, which is essentially what a casserole is. When done just right, the elements merge in the oven’s heat, building on one another until the flavors unite into a delicious whole, preferably one with a golden top and appealingly moist center. Then there is the matter of how amply a casserole feeds a crowd, and how once it is in the oven, it can be ignored until dinnertime.
The casserole is also ancient. It’s a method that predates ovens, when covered vessels of meat and vegetables were buried in hot embers to cook. Over the centuries, that method has produced some of the most enticing recipes in the world.
Take cassoulet, the classic French mix of beans, duck confit and sausages, baked with bread crumbs on top. (Like a casserole, cassoulet was named for the dish in which it’s traditionally baked: the cassole.) There is the tagine, another dish that shares a name with its cooking vessel, while moussaka, shepherd’s pie and lasagna are other exalted examples of the form. Gratins are simply casseroles by other names, and let’s not forget savory bread puddings and stratas, which move the casserole concept from dinner to brunch.
In the United States, however, casseroles swerved toward convenience, especially in the postwar years, when newly introduced lines of canned food had an air of modern glamour. Cooks were taught to rely on cans for ease and what was said to be good health, since the cans contained factory-produced, sterile ingredients. This gave birth to the likes of the famous eight-can casserole with canned chicken, two kinds of “cream of” soup, evaporated milk and canned chow mein noodles.
Compare this with what Floyd Cardoz, the chef of North End Grill in Battery Park City (and formerly of Tabla), was eating in Bombay as a child. You wouldn’t necessarily think of a fragrant baked rice dish with cardamom, cinnamon, golden fried onion and browned meat as a casserole. But biryani meets the definition with panache.
These days, when Mr. Cardoz cooks at home for his family, he often makes a casserole that borrows from the Parsis in India, a group of Zoroastrian Persians who settled in the country sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. He starts with a tomato sauce spiked with ginger, fresh mint and green chiles, which he pours over potatoes before baking. Near the end, he cracks eggs on top and bakes until they are just set. The dish is perfumed, pungent and creamy from the runny yolk that coats each tomato-laden bite.
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Even though he uses more aromatic and eclectic ingredients than what most Americans expect, his casseroles are no less convenient, and they hold his family’s interest. An example is a Middle Eastern-inspired dish of lamb ribs and chickpeas with dried limes, tamarind and clove. “Casseroles like this are great for my kids when they get tired of Indian food,” he said.
Other New York chefs have put casseroles on their menus, from the highbrow interpretations of macaroni and cheese (yes, a casserole) to gnocchi gratins covered in pecorino to baked ratatouilles.
Nicholas Wilber, the chef at the Fat Radish on the Lower East Side, has served cassoulet, potpies and savory crumbles to an appreciative, stylish throng. “Making a casserole is easy,” he said. “You just toss everything into a dish and bake it all together. But making a good casserole is much harder. You have to really think about how the ingredients are going to meld as they cook.”
For example, in his sophisticated beet crumble — a béchamel-bound dish with clothbound Cheddar and a nubby, peppery oatmeal topping — each bite is different from the last, with sweet beet, soft beet greens and crunchy hazelnuts vying for dominance on your fork. It’s both familiar (picture mac and cheese with vegetables instead of pasta) and utterly unexpected.
Mr. Wilber argues for investing in attractive, single-serving casserole dishes; anything cooked in them is automatically presentable. To that, I would add larger baking dishes, like copper and stoneware gratins. Enameled cast-iron is another handsome choice. Leave your workhorses, the tempered glass bakeware and brownie pans, in the cabinet. The baking dish, which is also the serving dish, should be as alluring as the food it contains.
The beet crumble takes the casserole in a new direction; more predictable on the usual casserole circuit is a Mexican-style bake with layers of tortillas, beans and melted cheese. Every casserole cookbook has at least one or two recipes for such a thing. Allrecipes.com has about 336.
But the one Pati Jinich writes about in her cookbook, “Pati’s Mexican Table,” is more complex from the use of dried pasilla chiles. I took the recipe further, embellishing it with pickled red onions and pumpkin seeds. A final dollop of crema laced with lime zest is lively and fresh.
The recipe originated with Sally Swift, the managing producer of “The Splendid Table” radio show, who grew up in a casserole-happy home in Wisconsin. To her, the fiery, smoky pasilla chiles were an antidote to the bland and mushy bakes of her youth.
“I was so disgusted with the casseroles in the Midwest when I was growing up; they were all so gloppy,” she said. “The Mexican casserole tradition has a lot more flavor and pizazz.”
In fact, her version has about as much pizazz as a casserole can without losing its warm, gather-round-the-table appeal.
Bringing the two together is about as good as dinner gets.
Recipes: Black Bean Chorizo Casserole With Pickled Onions | Indian-Spiced Tomato and Egg Casserole | Beet, Greens and Cheddar Crumble
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