SOLVED: This apparently is a baking dish. Thrift store find for my wife. But why is there a hole in the side? What is it?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Oh, and it's LARGE. That's my range it's sitting on, and it covers about 2/3 of it.
This is the only answer that sort of makes sense so far. For a pie with a crust, it lets you see what the crust looks like below the filling line.
I'm not a baker. Just a guesser.