I open the paper this morning, and the local Holiday Inn is having a Christmas Buffet on Christmas Day. They listed all the food they were planning on having, and there it was, right after the “Chef Carved Prime Rib” and “Smoked Ham with Sauces” - “Chicken Ala’Ronge”. What exactly is “Ronge”? Is it some sort of Middle Eastern Chicken dish? Is it French Free-Range chicken? Because it certainly could NOT be a massive mispelling of that classic french dish, Chicken a l’Orange.
<sigh> I knew I lived in an area with a large population of uneducated bumpkins. I just didn’t know it was quite this bad. What next? Whore’s Ovaries instead of hor d’oeuvres? Fox Grass instead of Fois Gras? What especially hurts is that someone obviously put some thought into how to spell it - it’s not like “ala’Ronge” is a common misspelling. Which means that someone, either at the Holiday Inn or at the local paper, has decided that it’s OK to simply MAKE UP words and spellings.
No, Athena, you were right the first time. My screenname is part of my first name and a word I like attached together. I didn’t realize it, until everyone started asking about the duck.
Just as a side note, there’s a place in northern Saskatchewan called “Lac la Ronge”, which seems to translate as “Corrosive Lake”. (“Ronger” means “to gnaw” according to the dictionary, though I did get “to corrode” back from one of the translation engines I hit.) I don’t think I want that duck. The potatoes might be good though.
So I wonder if this restaurant also puts on the menu:
Soup of the day:Soup Du Jour
(I visited a greasy spoon in upstate NY once that did that very thing - when I asked what the soup was, the waitress actually replied, “It’s Soup Du Jour, hon, just like it says on the menu.”)
Once in rural Wisconsin I stopped at a local restaurant, and ordered the chicken cacciatore. What I got was chicken stewed in a tomato sauce. When I asked for pasta on the side, the waitress said “what’s pasta?” When my query was taken to the cook, he was unable to supply any, but did give me buttered egg noodles with it.