Some things I learnt today

In writing my recipe for chicken, chorizo and cannellini bean casserole today, I learnt some interesting facts about terminology, which I thought worth sharing. Originally I had called the recipe ‘chicken, chorizo and cannellini bean stew’ but in comparing various methods for cooking stews and casseroles I discovered that this dish is actually technically classed as a fricassee. Child, Bertholle and Beck explain that,

To be technically correct, any recipe describing meat which is browned before it is simmered should be labelled a fricassee.

Thus, to be defined as a stew my chicken would need to be simmered in liquid from the start of its cooking. That said, Child et al. go onto explain that they do not always make the distinction since stew has become a catch all term in common usage. Nonetheless, I thought I’d best be safe and stick to the term ‘casserole’.

The other thing I learnt was that there are more varieties of pepper than I could have ever imagined and that trying to specify which type to use was futile, since even within the English language there are multiple names for the same thing. The pepper I used looked like this:

In Australia, this is called a bell pepper, but in England and America a bell pepper is your bog standard pepper, the type you get in the supermarket (in Australia we call this a capsicum). On most of the English and American sites, it seems to be referred to as a ‘sweet red pepper’. This is not very helpful because that term could be applied to your average pepper or capsicum, which is exactly the type I was trying to distinguish it from.

Of the varieties that sit under the capsicum annuum species, the Cubanelle pepper looked the most similar, but I thought it would be too prescriptive to recommend this; I am not even sure if they are widely available. Another name I came across was ‘sweet pointed peppers’, which sounded sensible, but only four sites defined them thus, so I did not have a lot of faith in the term’s authenticity. In the end I decided that, while I think the long peppers tend to have more depth of flavour when roasted, the difference is not so significant that it is worth all this trouble!