The menu name may even be different from the kitchen name. For example, from the 19th until the mid-20th century, many restaurant menus were written in French and not in the local language.
Examples include veal (calf), calamari (squid), and sweetbreads (pancreas or thymus gland). Culinary names are especially common for fish and seafood, where multiple species are marketed under a single familiar name.
Examples
Foods may come to have distinct culinary names for a variety of reasons:
- Euphemism: the idea of eating some foods may disgust or offend some eaters regardless of their actual taste
- Attractiveness: the traditional name may be considered dull, undistinctive, or unattractive
- Poetic / fancifulness: Many dishes have fanciful or jocular names.
- Grouping of a variety of sources under a single name
- Evocation of more prestigious, rarer, and more expensive foods for which they are a substitute
- Evocation of a specific culinary tradition
- Shrimp in Italian-American contexts is often called scampi
- Florentine refers to dishes that include spinach
- Squid is often called by its Italian name, calamari, on menus
- Different terminology stemming from diglossia
- Other
- In French, chestnuts are called châtaignes on the tree, but marrons in the kitchen
- "Laver" is a culinary name for certain edible algae, usually species of Porphyra such as Porphyra umbilicalis, although "green laver" may refer to species of Monostroma or Ulva; species of Ulva are also known as "sea lettuce"
- Truita de patata (lit. 'potato trout') in Catalan cuisine, a potato omelette: "if you don't catch a trout, you've got to have something more humble for dinner -- something to pretend is a trout".
- Cappon magro (lit. 'fast-day capon'), a seafood salad
Humor and ethnic dysphemism
Humorous exaltation often takes the form of a dysphemism disparaging particular groups or places. It has been observed that "Celtic dishes seem to receive more than their share of humorous names in English cookbooks". Many of these are now considered offensive. See List of foods named after places for foods named after their actual place of origin.
- Welsh rabbit, melted cheese on toast. "Welsh" was probably used as a pejorative dysphemism, meaning "anything substandard or vulgar", and suggesting that "only people as poor and stupid as the Welsh would eat cheese and call it rabbit", or that "the closest thing to rabbit the Welsh could afford was melted cheese on toast". Or it may simply allude to the "frugal diet of the upland Welsh".
- Welsh caviar, laverbread, made of seaweed;
- Essex lion, veal;
- Norfolk capon, kipper;
- Irish apricot, apple, grape, lemon, plum, etc., potato;
- Scotch woodcock, scrambled eggs and anchovies on toast;
- Dutch goose, a stuffed pig's stomach in Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine;
- French goose, a kind of sausage stew;
- English monkey, melted cheese with breadcrumbs soaked in milk, served on toast or crackers;
- Albany beef, Hudson River sturgeon used as a substitute for beef.
- Sea kitten, fish. A renaming proposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in the hope of dissuading people from eating fish, by likening fish to appealing companion animals.
See also
Notes
Bibliography
- "Culinary terminology" in Oxford Companion to Food, 1st edition, s.v.
- Andre Simon, A concise encyclopedia of gastronomy mentions 16 different 'culinary names' passim
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