Culinary name

Culinary names, menu names, or kitchen names are names of foods used in the preparation or selling of food, as opposed to their names in agriculture or in scientific nomenclature. 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), scampi (Italian-American name for shrimp), 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.

Foods may come to have distinct culinary names for a variety of reasons:

Notes

  1. ^ from a Provencal word for roosters' testicles, but homonymous with 'puppy love' Le petit Robert
  2. ^ Andre Simon, A concise encyclopedia of gastronomy, s.v.
  3. ^ Wayne Gisslen, Professional Cooking, p. 446
  4. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.

Bibliography

See also