Although we now use griddles and gridirons only to cook food, they were once used as instruments of torture, that is, as large, metal grates that inquisitors would set a person on and set a fire under. This may have been the original meaning of griddle and gridiron, since the words are used as names of torture devices in thirteenth-century manuscripts, but do not appear in written records as names of culinary utensils until the fourteenth century. More likely, however, is that the culinary sense was indeed the original meaning of these words, but was slow to find its way into written manuscripts simply because cooking utensils were considered less worthy of being written about than a gruesome account of torture. In origin, griddle and gridiron—as well as a host of other familiar words—derive ultimately from the Latin word cratis, meaning a wicker screen. Cratis gave rise to craticulum, a diminutive meaning little wicker screen, which then evolved into the Old French word gredil, a fire-pan whose surface was criss-crossed by ridges resembling a screen. In the late thirteenth century, the British borrowed the Old French gredil, but from it, for some unknown reason, they formed two words instead of just one: griddle and gridire, two names for the same culinary instrument. The second of these words would probably still be spelt gridire had people not mistakenly assumed that its final syllable had something to do with iron, an assumption prompted by the coincidence that gridires were indeed made of iron. Well-intentioned etymologists, acting on this false assumption, then changed the spelling of gridire to gridiron. Eventually the new form, gridiron, became so established that, in the nineteenth century, the first syllable broke away from the word and became grid, the name of any structure whose lattice-like pattern resembled the surface of a gridiron; the word grid, in other words, developed from the word gridiron, not the other way around. Other words that developed from cratis (the Latin source of griddle and gridiron) include cradle, crate, and grate. Of these three words, cradle has remained the closest to the original wicker screen sense of cratis: even today cradles are often made of wicker. Crates, on the other hand, originated as wicker boxes, while grates—such as those placed before a fireplace or over a sewer hole—have a lattice-like pattern resembling that of a wicker screen.
This cookware item is typically a weighty, shallow vessel, devoid of any sides, which is often equipped with a handle. However, a handle-less griddle is commonly integrated into the upper surface of contemporary stovetops. Utilizing negligible amounts of oil or fat, this implement is primarily used for the cooking process that is appropriately referred to as “baking” instead of “frying.”