Explain the sudden popularity of 9''x9" pans

March 27, 2019 11:43 AM

My whole life, the standard square baking pan size in the US has always been 8x8 inches. Suddenly 9x9 inch pans seem to be taking over. Why?

Some time in the last few months my son found a recipe online he wanted to try. It called for a 9"x9" pan. That's weird, I thought. Why the unusual size? Then I needed to buy a replacement 8x8 pan and when I looked for one in the usual places where you can expect to grab a cheap pan - Walmart, grocery store - all I could find were 9x9 pans. What's going on? Are 9x9 pans suddenly becoming more popular than 8x8? Why?

Note that I'm not asking if 8x8 pans still exist or where I can get one. I can see they're still readily available online. I just want to know why 9x9 pans, which never even used to be a thing as far as I knew, now seem to be the thing.

posted by Redstart to Food & Drink (15 answers total)

I would wager it's just baader-meinhoff effect in play. 9x9s have definitely been around for at least 3 decades, if the universe existed before I did, then I'd assume they would have had them for a long time as well. Like, I even remember brownie or cake mix boxes with instructions or illustrations for either pan size to different effect.

Also, I recall many times where I did not have the suggested size dish, so I'd just use foil to eyeball the correct size and put the batter/food in that.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:52 AM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

I am a millennial and am only used to 9x9" pans being requested when making boxed cake or brownie mixes. Date Range: 2000 (aka when I personally was allowed to bake by myself) to now
posted by Hermione Granger at 12:01 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've always thought they were fairly interchangeable and perhaps a matter of personal preference, and I use my 9x13 more anyway.

Google Ngram says 9x13 has occurred most per year in their corpus since about 1986, and 9x9 was more frequent than 8x8 from ~1989-1999, though 8x8 is the more frequent of the squares by 2008 (latest available data). Why, I can't say.

One idea might be portion size and appetites increasing, even though average household size in the USA has stayed roughly the same and in fact decreased a bit in that period.
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:10 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I always thought the reason 8x8 was the normal square pan was that it was really close (to within less than a square inch) to the same area as 9" round. But that doesn't tell me why 9x9 has gotten more common.
posted by LizardBreath at 12:16 PM on March 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm 60 years old and have used 9 x 9 pans for as long as I can remember (and I was baking before I was ten), so they aren't new. In fact, if you asked me at any time which was the more common size, I would have said 9 x 9. On the few occasions when I've seen recipes calling for 8 x 8 pans, I've treated these sizes as interchangeable, but I'm pretty casual about stuff like that.
posted by FencingGal at 12:17 PM on March 27, 2019 [8 favorites]

Counterdatapoint: I’ve been around a little less time than FencingGal and 9 x 9 gets a wtf from me. Normal size is 8 x 8 to this avid reader of cookbooks. Somebody should take a look at top selling cookbooks by year and see what they call for.
posted by HotToddy at 12:54 PM on March 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

This is nothing new, and it can cause problems. Delia Smith on THE TYRANNY OF TINS (ignore the advert).
posted by StephenB at 1:06 PM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

It's easy to use an 8x8 and put leftover batter in a small dish. Thrift shops tend to have tons of older baking pans, if you need 8x8.
posted by theora55 at 1:15 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

You're not alone, 8X8 used to be a normal size and now it's not!

Plates used to be smaller. Modern dinner plates are practically a serving platter compared to vintage dinner plates.

Vintage pie tins are usually smaller than what you get now. I usually have to increase the recipe I got from my grandmother to make an entire pie crust. I wonder if recipe portions are increasing and thus making baking equipment bigger?
posted by blnkfrnk at 1:35 PM on March 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

I can think of about a dozen or so recipes offhand that I've used that indicate one can use either size pan. And I'm pretty sure boxed baking mixes have both pan sizes on them, too.

I've been baking in the US for 30+ years and 9x9 is not new to me.
posted by cooker girl at 1:49 PM on March 27, 2019

A quick survey looks like Pyrex's standard square baker is 8x8. Wilton has mainly 8x8s (and some 6x6), but their 9x9 is branded as "Advance Select" or Ultra Bake Professional. Fiestaware's square baker is 9x9, but I don't completely think of them as traditional bakeware, more like serveware.

Some stores (William's Sonoma, Crate & Barrel) seem to call and 8x8 square tin baking dish a "traditional" cake tin, while their 9x9" is considered a "professional" baking tin (in line with the branding for Wilton).

I wonder if there's something about 9x9 that is trending toward fancier, larger sized cakes with a professional sheen, which matches an overall trend toward home cooks emulating professional chefs at home.

(And I concur that my vintage pie plates are small.)
posted by vunder at 2:27 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

So I looked at a few older cookbooks. The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery (1971), the Joy of Cooking (1975), the Gold Medal Century of Success Cookbook (1979), and Betty Crocker’s Boys and Girls Cookbook (1965) all have recipes that call for both sizes (for different recipes, not both sizes for one recipe). However, the Gold Medal cookbook has at least one recipe that says to use either an 8 inch or a 9 inch square pan. The Wise Encyclopedia has a bunch of recipes that don’t give a pan size at all, but from a quick look, when it does give a size for a square pan, 8 x 8 is more common. It’s also a very old-fashioned cookbook. I was given it by an aunt because a much older edition was a staple in her mother’s kitchen, and I don’t think it was revised much for the 1970s.

In the Boys and Girls Cookbook, there’s one recipe where I crossed out 8 x 8 and, in my kid handwriting, wrote 9 x 9, probably because that was the size my mom had. I’m guessing that’s why I remember 9 x 9 as normal.

So both sizes have been in use since at least the 1960s.
posted by FencingGal at 4:40 PM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

The Betty Crocker New Picture cookbook from 1961 uses both 8 x 8 and 9 x 9 inch square pans for cakes. The most common pan size, however, is 9 x 13 inches, or two 8- or 9-inch layers -- more cake for the effort. I have owned and used all of these for fifty years or so. For what it's worth, I do have two 8 x 8 inch cake pans, and only one 9 x 9 inch pan. These are all, I think, replacements, the originals having been pretty well used up.
posted by SereneStorm at 5:41 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Does it correspond at all with what is being baked in the pans? As in, some things need to be baked thicker, others thinner? Maybe trends in what is being baked call for larger pans?
posted by Crystal Fox at 5:55 PM on March 27, 2019

Response by poster: The answers here, combined with my own research, have convinced me that 9x9 is not as unusual as I thought and has definitely been in use for a while, but that I was correct to feel that 8x8 is really more common.

I googled "brownie recipe" and looked at the top 20 results that called for a square pan. Of those, 15 specified 8x8 and 5 called for 9x9.

I looked at the cookbooks we had in the house (mostly old, because now you can just use the internet, so why buy a new cookbook?)

These called for 9x9 pans:

Beard on Bread (1973)
James Beard's Theory & Practice of Good Cooking (1977)
Great Good Food (1993)

These sometimes called for 8x8 and sometimes 9x9:

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (1980's?)
Joy of Cooking (1981)
Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (1981) - mostly 8x8

These called for 8x8 pans:

American Cookery (1976)
Moosewood Cookbook (1977)
Reader's Digest Eat Better Live Better (1982)
Jane Brody's Good Food Book (1985)

But why was I unable to find an 8x8 pan in multiple stores where I feel sure I could have bought one in the recent past? If 3/4 of brownie recipes call for an 8x8 pan,, why would stores choose to stock only 9x9? I still think there's some unexplained pan trend going on and I'm hoping someone who works for a cookware company or decides what products some store chain will carry comes across this post and has something enlightening to say.
posted by Redstart at 1:39 PM on March 28, 2019 [4 favorites]