Where Are the Casseroles?
I'm delighted to report that I've been thinking about casseroles for years. Quite literally -- traceable back to 2022ish. It's not all-consuming, but it's one of those self-reinforcing thoughts that has me confirming my own theory at every turn: that casseroles have quietly vanished from American food culture, and nobody is talking about it.
During childhood, casseroles felt like an inevitability. Like, one day, the western standard dinner of "meat + grain + vegetable" would finally give way to the REAL standard of casserole-only meals. It was only a matter of time before the switch to a diet of "cream of something + tuna."
Where did this idea come from? Best guess: casseroles were the punchline in a lot of the shows on in the background. Malcolm in the Middle, The Middle, Modern Family -- they kept showing up as this ubiquitous, unavoidable thing that adults dealt with. Like taxes, or lower back pain.
And look -- I was a picky eater for my whole childhood. So there was this latent, childhood fear of the Day of Casserole Reckoning -- the day of finally having to succumb to eating the tuna mush and saying goodbye to texture and foods that weren't baked into a homogeneous slurry.
Then, adulthood arrived. And I am still casserole-less.
The thing that resurfaced all of this was The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window on Netflix. There's a running gag where Kristen Bell keeps dropping her casserole for dramatic effect.
That's when it hit me: where the heck are all the casseroles? I have been racking my mind, and I can't recall the last one I've seen. And not for lack of exposure to food -- recipes are a regular part of the browsing rotation. I've watched hundreds of hours of The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. Dozens of restaurants logged on Beli. And through all of it, not a single casserole. Not on a menu, not as a recipe, nothing. Where did they go??
What Even Is a Casserole?
This realization was immediately followed by another one: what even is a casserole? So, naturally, the polling began. I asked my exceeding patient friends and family, and answers ranged from "anything, so long as it's in a casserole dish" to "it has to have cream of <something> and a protein" to "I'm actually not sure." Not exactly a strong consensus for something that haunted an entire childhood.
The polling also surfaced a geographic theory. Growing up in the northeast, maybe casseroles just didn't gain traction there. Midwestern upbringing? The casserole nightmare might've been very real.
The Casserole Is Dead
Here's where the theory lands: the casserole may have just been a literary device -- a shorthand for "normal American dinner" that TV writers kept reaching for. And while a young, nervous version of me was bracing for the Day of Casserole Reckoning, society was quietly moving in the exact opposite direction.
I started to think about what a casserole actually represents. A bunch of things mushed together into an average. Everything gets the same treatment, same seasoning, same texture. Food today has moved so far from that. Potlucks now mean thinking about the vegetarians and the omnivores and the lactose intolerant folks. It means defaulting to foods that can be customized -- in recent history, I've served a Japanese curry with and without chicken, chicken cutlet with and without cheese, plus an assortment of salads and dressings on the side.
This goes beyond just neurotic hosting. Every big restaurant offers some version of this flexibility now; gluten free options, build-your-own bowls, the rise of "slop bowls" that have customization at the forefront. The whole trajectory of food has been away from "averaged mush" and toward distinct components that can be mixed and matched. Try to make a vegetarian portion of a tuna casserole. You can't! The concept is architecturally opposed to the way we eat now.
The casseroles never came. Maybe this realization will cure my jaw clenching.
A Crucial Addendum
This post is not an invitation to start gifting me casseroles. Please don't make my childhood fear a reality.