Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Gyuvech the Bulgarian name for a kind of earthenware casserole or the dish cooked in it. The name comes from the Turkish güveç, which has the same meaning. (It is djuvěc in Serbo-Croat, gjuveç in Albanian, and givech in Moldova).

The casserole is fairly shallow with a large surface area allowing maximum evaporation. It comes round or oval, lidless and sometimes earless, most often with vertical sides, though in the round version the sides could slope to a small flat base. The outside is normally unglazed because it was originally designed for cooking directly over embers. When glazed on both sides, the casserole is meant for oven cooking only.