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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, not 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:
- Euphemism: the idea of eating some foods may disgust or offend some eaters regardless of their actual taste.
- Attractiveness: the traditional name may be considered dull, undistinctive, or unattractive.
- The Chinese gooseberry was renamed the kiwi fruit, which has now become its agricultural name as well.
- The Dolphinfish is often referred to as Mahi-Mahi in order to discourage confusion with actual Dolphin meat.
- Comparison with more familiar foods
- Grouping of a variety of sources under a single name
- Tuna includes several different species
- Evocation of more prestigious, rarer, and more expensive foods for which they are a substitute
- Evocation of a specific culinary tradition
- Shrimp in Italian-American contexts is often called scampi
- Social differences
- Other
- In French, chestnuts are called châtaignes on the tree, but marrons in the kitchen.
Often several of these reasons coincide. Many North Americans would find "squid" disgusting as a food, but "calamari" evokes Italian tradition.
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