Culinary names,menu names, orkitchen names are names of foods used in the preparation or selling of food, as opposed to their names inagriculture or in scientificnomenclature. 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 inFrench and not in the local language.
Examples includeveal (calf),calamari (squid), andsweetbreads (pancreas orthymus gland). Culinary names are especially common for fish and seafood, where multiple species are marketed under a single familiar name.
In French,chestnuts are calledchâtaignes on the tree, butmarrons in the kitchen
"Laver" is a culinary name for certain edible algae,[11] usually species ofPorphyra such asPorphyra umbilicalis, although "green laver" may refer to species ofMonostroma orUlva; species ofUlva are also known as "sea lettuce"
Truita de patata (lit. 'potato trout') inCatalan cuisine, a potato omelette: "if you don'tcatch a trout, you've got to have something more humble for dinner -- something to pretendis a trout".[12]
Cappon magro (lit. 'fast-day capon'), a seafood salad
Humorous exaltation often takes the form of adysphemism disparaging particular groups or places.[13] It has been observed that "Celtic dishes seem to receive more than their share of humorous names in English cookbooks".[14] Many of these are now considered offensive.[15] SeeList 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,[13] meaning "anything substandard or vulgar",[16] and suggesting that "only people as poor and stupid as the Welsh would eat cheese and call it rabbit",[17][18] or that "the closest thing to rabbit the Welsh could afford was melted cheese on toast".[19] Or it may simply allude to the "frugal diet of the upland Welsh".[20]
^Kate Burridge,Blooming English: Observations on the Roots, Cultivation and Hybrids of the English Language,ISBN0521548322, 2004, p. 220
^Robert Hendrickson,The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 1997, as quoted in Horn, "Spitten image"
^cf. "Welsh comb" = "the thumb and four fingers" in Francis Grose,A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1788, as quoted in theOxford English Dictionary,s.v. 'Welsh'
