Interesting Food Names

Menus need to convey the right kind of information about a dish as concisely as possible. Short descriptions are used as advertising elements to entice customers. Sautéed shrimp in garlic butter is a good basic description, while zesty garlic butter might make a dish seem even more delicious. Adjectives such as 'tasty', 'fresh', or 'hot' go a long way in persuading a customer to try something. Words that actually refer to taste, such as 'bitter', 'salty', or 'sour' are rarely used. Fanciful participles such as 'married', 'kissed', 'accented', and 'hand-crafted' suggest high quality cooking or ingredients without really saying anything substantive about the dish. Below are a few regional food descriptions.

Toad in the hole (sausages baked in a batter),
Ants on a log (raisins on peanut butter on a celery stick),
Devil/Angel on horseback (oysters/dates wrapped in bacon),
Bubble and Squeak (fried potato, cabbage, and more),
Pigs in a blanket (a sausage wrapped in dough or bacon)
Spotted Dick (a pudding with raisins and custard),
Hush puppies (deep fried cornbread balls),
Love in disguise (a Welsh dish of stuffed and boiled heart).

Incidentally, during 1972-73 the American Food for Peace Program sent tons of yellow corn from the United States to Botswana for distribution in schools as drought relief. The shamed and humiliated secondary school students in Serowe rioted, burned the headmaster’s car, and destroyed stockpiles of the corn. Seems only white maize is fit for human consumption there. Yellow is fed to animals.