Just another data point here: I’ve heard “casserole” used to describe the Pyrex pan, and the dish cooked in it - a melange of meat, sometimes vegetables, sometimes a starch, and some sort of sauce to bind it. Sausage and egg casserole is a Christmas morning tradition in my family, and broccoli casserole a Thanksgiving one. I’ve never heard the word used for a cold dish of any sort.
Yorkshire Pudding, sending good thoughts to you and Mrs. Pudding (Or should that be Gravy?). FWIW, I thought your post was perfectly good snark, in the finest SDMB tradition; especially if read, as I did, in David Mitchell’s voice.
" Pasta" and “noodles” are different in the US too - we wouldn’t call the egg noodles that are typically used in a tuna-noodle casserole “pasta” but “noodles” aren’t only what you eat with Chinese food ." In fact , it’s almost the opposite - we mostly restrict “pasta” to the Italian version*, so the egg noodles ( like these ) you might find in a stew or chicken noodle soup are “noodles” not “pasta”.
You might find egg noodles or Chinese noodles in the supermarket aisle labeled “pasta” , but that’s it. No one would ever refer to needing pasta to serve with the beef stew.
I can’t speak for the whole United States. But in my personal experience, “spaghetti” could refer to the whole dish (sauce and all) or just the noodles, and it wouldn’t be at all uncommon or strange to refer to “spaghetti noodles” if you wanted to be specific that you were referring to the stuff that you put the sauce on. (I might also refer to it as “pasta,” but “spaghetti pasta” sounds awkwardly redundant.)
Just going by memory, which may be faulty, but I don’t remember the word “pasta” being used a lot when I was growing up in the 1970s. “Pasta” would have seemed somewhat exotic, while “noodles” were plain, down-home food. It’s hard to think of any food more unpretentiously American than chicken noodle soup.
I heard some celebrity once joking about how when she was young, her family was poor, and so they ate things like noodles with black-eyed peas. But now that she was rich, she could afford to eat healthy foods like pasta and legumes.
I can’t ever recall hearing “pasta” in my neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1950s/1960s, even though it was mostly Italian. (My family was Irish-German; probably it was used in Italian households.) There was spaghetti, and then there were different kinds of “macaroni,” mostly elbow macaroni or maybe shells. Anything else was noodles, which could include egg noodles, lasagna noodles, or Chinese noodles. In fact, pasta was rarely used until the late 1970s, when it suddenly took off.
I grew up in an Italian-American family in Queens, and don’t recall hearing the word pasta until the late 70s/early 80s. Before that, it was either called by the specific name for that shape ( spaghetti, ziti, ravioli) or “macaroni” might be used to refer to any tubular pasta too small to be stuffed, as they are somewhat interchangeable - if I can’t get penne, ziti will do.
I learned of bubur while living in Malaysia, via a proverb: Nasi sudah menjadi bubur, the rice has already become porridge, the equivalent of can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, can’t undo what’s been done. Referring to the popular pan-Asian rice porridge known variously as congee, jook, zhōu, cháo, kayu, or lugaw, besides bubur.
My Malay friends also shared with me a little-known fact: the original ancestors of the Malays, before rice was imported, lived on sago. This was said over a dessert of sago pearls simmered in sweetened coconut milk. Still a favorite dish in Malaysia, yet maybe thousands of years old.
Well, you might possibly hear someone made a casserole with tuna and pasta, but putting spaghetti in the dish would be truly bizarre.
Noodle is the common term in the US. Or it was, anyway.
I feel the same. Today, the generic term is “pasta”, and there’s a pasta ailes in the supermarket, which includes egg noodles, and spaghetti, and various shapes of Italianesque pasta. And I wouldn’t be shocked if someone told me they had a casserole with beef and pasta, although I agree that the common term would be “noodle”. But I don’t think I even knew the word “pasta” as a child. Any pasta that wasn’t spaghetti was some kind of noodle. You might have referred to lasagna noodles, for instance.
Oh, yeah, the tubular ones could all be called macaroni. Or noodles. But I’m not Italian, although there were lots of Italians in my town when I was a kid.
Out of curiosity, I looked up my grandmother’s hand-written cavatini recipe, and it calls for “1 cup each of 4 different pastas” (e.g., wagonwheels, rotini, shells, and bowties, and I don’t know why it’s important that it uses different shapes, but it totally is).
Only problem is, I’m not sure when that recipe was written. No later than the mid-80s, I’m sure, but it could be much older.
Out of curiosity, I looked up my grandmother’s hand-written cavatini recipe, and it calls for “1 cup each of 4 different pastas” (e.g., wagonwheels, rotini, shells, and bowties, and I don’t know why it’s important that it uses different shapes, but it totally is).
Only problem is, I’m not sure when that recipe was written. No later than the mid-80s, I’m sure, but it could be much older.
Are they ordinarily known as bowties in your neck of the woods? They’d be bows in the UK, if anglicised, but they’re not always. In fact, my sister sent me a photo earlier of some she’d just made, captioned as “farfalle”, and it didn’t come across as unusual.
Lasagna is a type of casserole. I’m surprised that is not more widely known, but I guess it’s been such a stand-alone term that I can see where it’s category could be overlooked.
I grew up in a Sicilian-American immigrant extended family, where pasta was always called pasta as early as I can remember in the 1960s, and obviously had been in use since my grandparents immigrated in 1920.
Pasta shapes can commonly be found labeled both in Italian and in English-word descriptions of the shapes. Wagon wheels have an Italian name, too, but I can’t remember it.
(checks cupboard)
OK, the boxes I have are indeed “Farfalle” and “rotelle”.
I was a bit surprised when I first encountered this: the idea that the dish known to a Brit as “Spaghetti Bolognaise/Bolognese” could just be called “Spaghetti” in the US, despite the obvious existence of other things to do with spaghetti. But, y’know, the whole origin of this thread is the idea that a food word can mean more than one thing according to context, so fair enough.
And yes, I know the above mentioned dish is an ersatz, non-authentic attempt at Italian cooking! I’m just talking about the names by which the dish goes, and for that it needn’t be authentic, merely extant. Just thought I’d get my retaliation in first…
Mrs. Plant (v.3.0) refers to all pasta as “noodles”. I use the general term pasta. Spaghetti covers angel hair, vermicelli, and “thin spaghetti” to my knowledge.
