this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
36 points (95.0% liked)
Animals
370 readers
49 users here now
Anything and everything about non-human animals.
Rules:
- Posts should be relevant to non-human animals, including articles (news or just interesting facts), pictures (OC only but the animals need not be your pets), or text posts.
- Keep things civil. Don't insult other users or their pets. Do not post content that promotes animal abuse (this does not include content, like news, that portrays abuse in a negative light).
- Follow site-wide rules
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hmmm... this is going to be an interesting one to translate.
When kids are in that 8-10 year old range and think it's gross to touch the opposite sex, it is often joked they have mythical bugs called "cooties." They're supposed to be like lice (polls/piojos), but you catch them from touching someone of the same age but opposite gender. I guess the pinching of the paper fortune teller is supposed to remove them from your friends. π
We mainly used them as a fortune tellers, sometimes as little animals themselves if they were done with eyes and such. Doing some reading on the origin, it seems it first got tanslated to English to be used as a salt cellar. This Reddit post has people from a bunch of places saying what the origami thing is called where they're from. I thought "cocotte" in French was interesting. (olla de ferro colat) I can see the points looking like the little legs on the bottom of the pot if it were used upside down.
Cocotte en fonte , or 'casserole dish made of cast iron,' literally.
I'm curious as to why they're Dutch ovens in (US) English. What makes them so "Dutch" that we call them that over just calling it a "cast iron pot" like everyone else seems to?
Dunno, are they exactly the same things?
I cook a lot as a (mostly) vegetarian, but cookery & crockery like that seem like they're primarily for meat-oriented dishes. But again, I'm not really sure...
It gives me pics of the traditional Le Crueset/Staub pots when I search them.
They've got a COVID era resurgence from people using them to bake their artisanal breads, and the cooking shows always use them for stews/braises and sometimes frying so all that mass provides better temperature stability.
Is there something specific you're aiming to cook?
Oh, no. It was just one of the names that came up for the cootie catcher in the post I linked! People from diff parts of the world were saying what they called it, and the one French person said cocotte, and I liked that was different than the other things people saw it as.