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Food Pseudonyms

liuzhou

By liuzhou
in Food Traditions & Culture

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rotuts

rotuts

Posted
Posted

Rocky Mountain Oysters ?

 

I think everyone knows this one.

 

lots of 'innards' have palatable names  : Pancreas and Thymus.  Ive never seen then individually named and both as sweetbreads.

 

ive neer had both as the same time so can't say if they taste the same.

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ElainaA

ElainaA

Posted
Posted (edited)

Lamb fries sounds a lot better than lamb testicles. Also 'lights' as a euphemism for lungs.

 

More informally, I think parents often do this with small children (as with liuzhou's  parsnips). When of my nephews was about 2 or 3, the only meat he would eat was chicken. In reality he was eating pork, beef - whatever the family had - only my sister told him it was chicken. He caught on after awhile but it worked for a time.

 

Elaina

Edited by ElainaA (log)
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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. Cicero

But the library must contain cookbooks. Elaina

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cyalexa

cyalexa

Posted
Posted

Arising from the Dinner thread.

 

My son decided one day that he hated parsnips. Later that week he was served "Chinese White Carrots", which he loved. They were parsnips!

 

What other foods do we rename to get the fussy to eat them?

Thanks for starting this thread - I might learn some helpful pseudonyms!

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Toliver

Toliver

Posted
Posted

Butter beans.

They sound great, don't they? 

It's just another name for horrid little Lima Beans. :angry:

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“Peter: Oh my god, Brian, there's a message in my Alphabits. It says, 'Oooooo.'

Brian: Peter, those are Cheerios.”

– From Fox TV’s “Family Guy”

 

Tim Oliver

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cyalexa

cyalexa

Posted
Posted

I don't suppose there's much to do about tongue. Or is there?

I can only serve tongue to my husband heavily sauced in gravy (another "pot roast") or on a sandwich with jus on the side ("french dip"). Even peeled I think he might recognize the musculature if it wasn't covered up.  

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dcarch

dcarch

Posted
Posted

The Chinese is the world's most prolific inventor of food Pseudonyms

 

Phoenix resting on a jade tree = chicken with broccoli.

 

thousand silver needles shooting the clouds = scrambled eggs with bean sprouts.

 

I understand there are hundreds or more.

 

 

dcarch

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gfweb

gfweb

Posted
Posted

Portobello mushrooms are just big criminis. A marketer invented the name to boost sales,which it really did.

 

Likewise with Chilean sea bass, which used to be named patagonian toothfish.

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Alex

Alex

Posted
Posted

Little Green Balls of Death instead of Brussels sprouts. Oh, wait. That's to get people to not eat them.

 

Freedom Fries -- for the fussy faux patriot in your family

 

There's a forum on Chow about this, too.

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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MelissaH

MelissaH

Posted
Posted

A friend's small children decided one day that anything with visible onions was no longer edible. So all of a sudden, meatloaf and other food had "water chestnuts" instead, although the recipe and preparation had not changed one bit! (Fortunately, the phase didn't last long.)

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MelissaH

Oswego, NY

Chemist, writer, hired gun

Say this five times fast: "A big blue bucket of blue blueberries."

foodblog1 | kitchen reno | foodblog2

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Anna N

Anna N

Posted
Posted

you bet

 

CANadian OiLA

 

who would buy  Rape seed Oil ?

 

:blink:

Apparently the Europeans have no issue with it. I watch the Scandinavian cooking show and they call it rapeseed oil.

Anna Nielsen aka "Anna N"

...I just let people know about something I made for supper that they might enjoy, too. That's all it is. (Nigel Slater)

"Cooking is about doing the best with what you have . . . and succeeding." John Thorne

Our 2012 (Kerry Beal and me) Blog

My 2004 eG Blog

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Ashen

Ashen

Posted
Posted

Portobello mushrooms are just big criminis. A marketer invented the name to boost sales,which it really did.

 

 

It worked so well that  some companies  are now marketing  creminis as baby bellas

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"Why is the rum always gone?"

Captain Jack Sparrow

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haresfur

haresfur

Posted
Posted

I was looking after a friend's kid one time when she was stuck at work and was told he liked to eat spaghetti with nothing but grated cheese. I asked him if he wanted some pasta and he said an emphatic 'no'. So I asked him what shape spaghetti he wanted and he happily chose the spiral spaghetti.

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It's almost never bad to feed someone.

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liuzhou

liuzhou

Posted
  • Topic Starter
Posted (edited)

I'm sure when I was in junior and high school, many of the dishes served up in the rather dire school canteen has pseudonyms. These weren't designed to make the food more appealing. It would have taken a lot more than a bit of wordplay to make these in any way appealing. 

 

These names were bestowed by the pupils and were intended to make things even worse.

 

The only one I can recall (it was in the middle of the last century!) is the currant cake which was served with custard once a week.

 

Universally known as 'fly cemetery'.

Edited by liuzhou (log)
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...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

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Anna N

Anna N

Posted
Posted

I was looking after a friend's kid one time when she was stuck at work and was told he liked to eat spaghetti with nothing but grated cheese. I asked him if he wanted some pasta and he said an emphatic 'no'. So I asked him what shape spaghetti he wanted and he happily chose the spiral spaghetti.

Probably forgivable in a child but my late husband refused to eat pasta but one of his favourite meals was spaghetti and meatballs proving beyond a doubt that spaghetti is not pasta!

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Anna Nielsen aka "Anna N"

...I just let people know about something I made for supper that they might enjoy, too. That's all it is. (Nigel Slater)

"Cooking is about doing the best with what you have . . . and succeeding." John Thorne

Our 2012 (Kerry Beal and me) Blog

My 2004 eG Blog

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