Recipe Names

[Bruschetta]

I'm curious about the different forms of recipe names, and was reminded of this by somebody posting a recipe called "pit stop fritatta" in another thread.

In some cookbooks (and in those Diane Mott Davidson mysteries), recipes have cute or hokey names that don't tell you very much about the dish: "Pit stop fritatta," "Aspen Meadow muffins," "Death by Chocolate" and so on. There are even serious names for dishes that aren't very informative, like steak Diane, peach Melba, pasta puttanesca, etc.

On the flip side, there are dish names that almost ARE the recipe. Anything they show on Top Chef, for example, lists about twenty ingredients as the name of the dish: "Braised shank of elk in bourbon with lemon cucumbers, raspberries, gorgonzola, micro-microgreens and confit of kitchen sink," or something like that.

Is there a happy medium? Are names that give the historical reference (like peach Melba) or a sense of the occasion that the dish was served better than a list of ingredients? When you create a new dish, do you name it?