Saucepan

 ( Cooking Vessels ) 

A saucepan is one of the basic forms of cookware (not technically a pan), in the form of a round cooking vessel, typically deep, and wide enough to hold at least of water, with sizes typically ranging up to ,Susan Westmoreland, Step by Step Cookbook: More Than 1,000 Recipes (2008), p. 10. and having a long handle protruding from the vessel. The saucepan can be differentiated from the saucepot by the fact that "a saucepan is a cooking utensil with one handle; a saucepot is equipped with two side handles".Louise Jenison Peet, Mary S. Pickett, and Mildred G. Arnold, Household Equipment (1979), p. 120. Unlike cooking pans, a saucepan is usually not engineered to have non-stick surface. This is so that it can be used in deglazing, a process by which food stuck to the surface of the pan from cooking is recooked with liquid and other ingredients to form a sauce.

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History A predecessor of the saucepan, preceding the wider use of metal cookware in the late Middle Ages, was the pipkin,Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (2007), p. 500. an earthenware cooking pot used for cooking over direct heat from coals or a wood fire. They were not held in direct flame which would crack the ceramic. It has a handle and many (though not all) examples had three feet. Late medieval and post-medieval pipkins had a hollow handle into which a stick might be inserted for manipulation. Examples exist unglazed, fully Ceramic glaze, and glazed only on the interior. While often spheroidal, they were made with straight outwardly-sloping sides. In early modern Europe, saucepans "had small iron trivets, or stands, so that they could be pushed into the hot ashes" for cooking.Marjorie Quennell, A History of Everyday Things in England: 1500-1799 (1920), p. 180.

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Uses Saucepans are most often used for making sauces, soups, gravies, and stews. Because of their relatively tall, straight sides and long handles, they are also well-suited for tasks that require liquids, such as boiling pasta, simmering stocks, and reheating leftovers.  

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Terminology In French, the saucepan is called a "casserole", which may lead to confusion. As one cookbook explains:

In some households, saucepans are called "pots", in contrast with wider forms of pans, although this confuses them with the traditional cooking pot.Sarah Marshall, Preservation Pantry: Modern Canning From Root to Top & Stem to Core (2007), p. 27: "A proper stove station needs good pots, called saucepans here. Saucepans are tall and wide and generally fitted with a lid". Historically, a pot can be broadly defined as "any closed vessel manufactured for use in the cooking process",Jeffrey A. Blakely, W. J. Bennett, Lawrence E. Toombs, Tell El-Hesi: The Persian Period (stratum V) (1980), p. 203. but in modern usage, a pot may typically be contrasted to a frying pan, compared to which a pot "is a deep vessel with a relatively heavy bottom and a lid.Colman Andrews, Country Cooking of Italy (2012), p. 13.

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