I don’t know if anybody will be able to come up with a factual answer, but I figured I’d try.
How did a broiling pan come to be standard with an oven? Every other piece of oven and stove equipment must be acquired seperately, but the Broiler pan is part of the deal. It’s not the most used piece of cookware, way behind the usefulness of a roasting pan, cookie sheet, frying pan, or sauce pan. It’s a fairly specialized piece of equipment, something more generally useful would make more sence to me. Give me a frying pan first, and I’ll buy my own broiling pan when I feel the need to broil. Plus the very high heat nature of broiling causes little spots of cemented on stuff to become one with the pan, which would appear to make it less of a candidate to pass on the the next guy. And it’s not like it’s specially fitted to that oven model or something. At one apartment I lived they said one of the major complaints they got from old ladies was that the broiling pan was missing, so they carefully checked for it on check-out, and charged if it was missing.
Was there an epidemic of people refusing to by ovens unless they had a broiling pan at the very instant the oven was installed at or something at one time?
Another WAG – it wouldn’t surprise me if broiling were something that you couldn’t do on an old-fashioned wood stove. And on gas stoves, you could broil, but (at least on my old stove), you had a special compartment under the stove. So if you were trying to market a new-fangled electric stove and wanted to convince people that it was versatile, this would be the thing you’d include. Of course you can bake and fry stuff, but with our new stove, you can easily *broil * as well.
And, of course, once you start including a broiling pan, it becomes traditional.
Actually, while wall ovens vary in size, ranges are completely standard, unless you get a fancy commercial range. I’ve always wondered about the OP, too.
I still have a hard time believing size matter that much. [sub]snicker[/sub]
Every broiler pan I have ever seen is about 16-18 inches, and the oven is 24 inches or so. Plenty of room for convection around it, if that’s even a factor in broiling, which I doubt.
Thanks. The similarity to ‘boil’ had me confused. although I’ve seen the term ‘broil’ before, I’ve never had the opportunity to actually ask its meaning.
For those that have never seen one, here’s a bright and clean broiler pan Typical dimensions are in the area of 12x18" and they just sit on the rack, so they’re not even specific to any particular model or brand of oven.
As they’re used just a couple inches underneath the heat (either gas or electric) they do tend to collect baked-on crud if you don’t scrub them each time.
“Grill” is what you do outside a few inches over charcoal or gas flame. “Broil” is it’s closest indoor analogue: cooking inside a very hot oven just a few inches under the heat source. It’s sort of “upside down” grilling. Most US stoves have a broiler in the bottom see, it’s that little door on the bottom.
At one time, I had a wall oven with a broiler pan that rested on tracks on the wall, not on a standard oven rack. So it was suspended by the tracks on each side. You had to have the one that came with the oven, or you risked having your steak (and the pan) take a tumble.)
Only if they’re gas. Electric ovens utilize the actual oven as a broiler – you just move the rack to the highest level so the pan is close to the heating element on top (the broil setting keeps the lower heating element off) – and the drawer below (if we’re talking about a full range – built-in wall ovens don’t have that lower drawer at all) is for storage.
Further disambiguation: the oven-based thing (gas or electric, top-down) is what we in the UK (and Australia, I’m guessing from jabiru’s response) call “grilling”. The former we know as “barbecuing”.
Even further disambiguation: in America, “barbecuing” refers to indirect cooking over a slow fire (either with wood that has been burned down to coals, fresh firewood, or a combination thereof) usually, though not always, with an element of smoke. Certain regions of the US will use barbecuing and grilling synonymously, but with serious outdoor cooks, barbecue is defined by “low and slow” indirect heat, and grilling by a fast cook and direct heat. There are some gray areas (such as cooking very slowly but directly over a heat source which requires fine fire control and which I would consider barbecue instead of grilling) but for the most part, that’s indirect/slow & direct/fast is the easiest way to define the difference between BBQ & grilling.
