A square sheet metal tray, deep about as a frying pan. Fits into a stove. There are many dishes for which it is suitable - pilav (aka pilaf), podvarak (rice, chopped sour cabbage, meat on top), đuveč (similar but bell peppers and tomatoes instead of cabbage, smaller pieces of meat), musaka (moussaka, of greek origins - odd layers of some vegetable - potato, squash, cauliflower, swiss chards, even layers of ground meat), even some versions of sarma. Also fits some cakes, specially the lazy pie.
A must have in every kitchen here. In some areas it's called đuveč because its primary purpose was to make đuveč. Don't get me started with using the same word for the meal and the vessel - english doesn't distinguish dish from dish, glass from glass, cherry from cherry, cake from cakes, hemi from hemi from hemi.
The name is a distortion of german Blech, which means sheet metal in german, and was also used (as „pleh“ [plehh]) when I was a kid, when it meant both sheet metal (for which we have a word „lim“ which means nothing else, and has a whole set of derived words - limeni (made of sheet metal), limenka (tin can), limar (sheet metal worker)) but also a plek. Over time the things settled, so plek is this vessel, and sheet metal is just lim. The funny nickname for the sheet metal worker is 'plekadžija', sticking turkish suffix on german base being a nice touch.
Nowadays we use glassware instead, except for some types of roast, cakes and pizza (which goes into a shallower plek, such as comes with the oven). And yes, her pizza is square, to fit the whole plek, so I get more of the crunchy edge in the corners :).
And for pilav nobody ever says „rice pilav“. Out of two thousand recipes for it, only a handful use some other grain, so if one of those was ever mentioned (didn't happen in my lifetime so far, nobody even knows they exist, I found that on the wikipedia), it would have that ingredient as an attribute. For the rest of them, everybody knows they're rice, so why waste words.
18-VIII-2024 - 18-VIII-2024