To Bowdlerize:
Seen on the menu of the cafeteria in my building:
Honey, if it can’t melt your face off, it ain’t Vindaloo ;):D. So - why? I appreciate your concern for folks’ delicate sensibilities - but then don’t call it Vindaloo!
Argh.
Cheesesteaks without the Whiz are all that’s available outside of a limited area in Philly. Why? …a Bowdlerization most foul, IMHO.
Philly Cheesesteaks got by without Cheez Whiz just fine for 30 years.
If we retain the literary censorship analogy, Cheez Whiz is child pornography – it doesn’t begin to make sense to talk about “Bowdlerizing” it.
Nicely put! 
Some recipes for Vietnamese food suggest that the fish sauce can be substituted by soy sauce. Not and still be Vietnamese food!
Most cheesesteaks in Philly don’t use Whiz, either. And of all the ways that folks manage to get cheesesteaks wrong, that’s the one you pick?
Nah, I know all that, but the Whiz has its adherents (right there in the sauce! Ba-Dum BOOM!) and I have never seen it outside of S. Philadelphia. There’s something about the comingling of the Whiz Wang and the meat and bread that is greater than the sum of its parts. 
Caesar salad is the biggest example that I notice regularly. The real recipe for the dressing includes raw eggs, mustard, anchovies, Worcestershire, and garlic. Strong flavors! The Caesar salads that are served in restaurants today are just full of parmesan cheese and some sort of inoffensive creamy bottled dressing that I’m willing to bet doesn’t contain any of the traditional ingredients, except possibly a little garlic.
Today, it seems that foods are reformulated to have much less salt and fat. In most cases, though, the fat and salt are the only things giving the food its flavor.
I’d much rather eat less cheese than eat low fat “cheese”, which tastes and feels alarmingly like plastic.
Cheesesteaks with Whiz are certainly available in Southern California. Isn’t this a national chain?
ETA: Had wrong link, and it’s NOT a national chain.
Good Lord, it’s everywhere. I’ve considered starting a thread about how many food names actually mean something, and (as Q.N. Jones states) a Caesar salad actually consists of a group of precise, well-defined ingredients and is NOT just Romaine lettuce, croutons, and some gunky dressing on top. But I figured I’d get roundly bitched at for being a food snob, so I haven’t.
My biggest peeves seem to be around pasta. What is it about pasta that nobody realizes these names mean something?
Carbonara : Pasta Carbonara consists of eggs, Parmesan, and some Pancetta. If you’re in the US and Pancetta is hard to find, going with bacon instead is acceptable, as is throwing in a little white wine to thin the sauce. It does NOT have cream, peas, chicken, or red bell peppers in it. Or (gasp) cream cheese.
Alfredo: Cream, butter, Parmesan. Not some flour-thickened goo out of a bottle. And don’t even get me started on “low-cal” Alfredo.
Puttanesca: is NOT marinara sauce with some olives in it. It must have anchovies, black olives, and capers. It is NEVER topped with cheese.
I’m sure I’ll think of more as the day progresses.
Oooh, is this the “rant about sauces thread”?
I know what salsa brava is. It was invented by a barman in my hometown, you see, and I was one of its first taste-testers, so I know perfectly well what it is, or at least when it was when it got created. It is real mayonnaise (egg, olive oil, salt) with a heavy sprinkling of paprika - enough to make it “fighter sauce”. It is NOT fake-mayo mixed with ketchup!
How about people bowdlerizing their own food?
I’m talking about grown adults who, say, order fish tacos with just the fish and the tortilla; that’s it - no pico de gallo, no crispy shredded cabbage, no delectable sauce. Or even worse, how about the people who order poutine sans gravy?
I see these people out, and, quite honestly, all I want to do is go up to them and give them a bib and a sippy cup.
Cretins!
I can also get cheeseteaks with Cheez Whiz in San Francisco without too much trouble. Though I don’t know if they’d be considered acceptable otherwise since I’ve never had cheeseteak in Philadelphia and never had cheeseteak anywhere else with beef.
I don’t really care what people call their food, just whether it is good. So go ahead and make your Caesar salad with watercress, radishes, and Russian dressing. All I ask, though, is that if non-standard ingredients are being used that full disclosure be made.
I do not like avocado. When I order a Cobb salad I always say “hold the avocado.” At least half the time I am told “It doesn’t come with avocado.” Arrgh! It’s supposed to have avocado! That’s what a Cobb salad is! Just because I don’t like it doesn’t alter the proper ingredients.
OTOH, the other night I made stroganoff and forgot to put in the Worcestershire sauce, which isn’t strictly necessary, but I always use it. So I guess I did it to myself.
I once got a chef’s salad that came without any meat or eggs on it. In fact, it’s what is typically called a “garden salad” - just veggies and lettuce.
I asked the owner of the place (it’s a coffee shop with sandwiches and such) where the meat was and she looked at me like 
. I said “it’s a chef’s salad, it’s supposed to have meat and hard-boiled eggs.” She said “oh, we just make them with veggies here.”
I wanted to ask what world she lived in where a chef’s salad was just veggies. Even McDonald’s gets a chef’s salad right. What was she thinking?
Wrong. The original Caesar salad created by Caesar Cardini had neither mustard nor anchovies.
ETA: The anchovy flavor came from the Worcestershire sauce.
I’ve been to several (snack bar type) places that advertised they sold Nathan’s franks. But, they didn’t have sauerkraut. What’s the point of a Nathan’s hot dog without sauerkraut?
Now see, I thought at first this thread was about bowdlerizing the names of food, not the food itself. I was going to take this pasta sauce as example. It’s called puttanesca because the dish was invented by prostitutes who were using whatever food they had on hand to make a quick dinner before they all had to go see their customers. I wish I knew what they call it now in Italy and in Spanish-speaking countries - I would feel a bit odd serving my respectable Spanish-speaking relatives a pasta dish with the word “puta” (whore) in the name. :o
As for dish bowdlerization, I tend to ask restaurants to hold the cheese due to my lactose intolerance. If it’s a dish that absolutely requires cheese, I either take some Lactaid with it or order something else. I was going to say something about spicy food, but will post more later.
I always find threads like this interesting for the parallels with the battle between linguistic descriptivists and linguistic prescriptivists.
At what point does actual usage trump originalism? What regional accents are before it has veered off into something else entirely? Is using ground beef in stroganoff an abomination (as one of my co-workers feels, though I was an adult before I’d ever seen it another way) or the culinary version of “all y’all.”
As mentioned above, Italian pasta sauces are often the worst offenders. I’ll actually go farther on what I consider a carbonara to be: it should be made with guanciale, if possible, but pancetta is okay. Also, the cheese should traditionally be pecorino romano not parmesan, which has a different taste. I’m not really going to bicker on those points, though, as long as it doesn’t come with a weird cream sauce with peas or whatnot in it.
And puttanesca just as marinara with olives? Thank goodness I’ve never been exposed to that.
I’m not a fan of “barbecue” being used as an adjective to mean “any food cooked in any manner with barbecue sauce slapped on it.” Barbecue is a manner of cooking. I can’t just throw a chicken in a crockpot with barbecue sauce and call it “barbecue chicken.” That’s just crockpot chicken with barbecue sauce.
If we expand this to drinks, the martini is a big offender. Anything served in a cocktail glass is not a martini (I’m looking at you, appletini, chocotini, etc.) Also, if it doesn’t have vermouth, it’s just gin!.
Goulash has come to mean something completely different in the US than it does in Europe, and even in Europe it’s a bit different than what it is in Hungary (the source of the name). (In Hungary, it’s a soup, sometimes known as goulash soup in English. The stew version is called pörkölt, but at least they’re closely related. The mish-mash of stuff that has gotten then name “goulash” in the US has nothing to do with either of those dishes, so far as I can see.)
There are so many more, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.