this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Yeah I am English. I would never call a cake tin a cake pan. Same with a roasting tray is never called a roasting pan. For it to be a pan it has to go on a hob. Even the way you describe things like a sauce pan seems contradictory, by your definition it should be a pot rather than a pan. It's interesting to note what local differences exist in the use of language.
You definitely can do high heat cooking in a pot. Most of them are stainless steel or cast iron after all, the material doesn't care.
Edit: forgot to mention that you can also have oven trays, which are flatter than a roasting tray. Roasting tray would be for say roasting potatoes or meat with sauce, and a tray would be for pizza or flatbread or chips.
Sure, but most of the time when you're doing high-heat cooking you're not using a lot of liquid so a pan with its shallow sides makes it easier to get a spatula or tongs in to move things around. The high sides are only useful when you want to heat a large volume of stuff. Typically that means you're using a water-based liquid (even something like a tomato sauce is mostly water based), so the heat will be at most 100C.
I suspect the British version of "pan" including what I'd call a pot must be from after North American English and British English diverged. The etymology of pan says that it has referred to a shallow thing since even before ancient Greek:
I guess the North American English dialects kept this meaning of a shallow thing, whereas British English focused on whether or not it goes on a burner (which apparently you call a hob).
I've heard differing interpretations even in england. According to my dad for example a pot is made of ceramic, so if it's made of stainless steel it's a pan.