We westerners are so lame when it comes to naming food. French onion soup, for example, is a boring name for a tasty dish. Chinese food has much more imaginative names, such as Dragon and Phoenix or Many Happiness Duck.
So I say let’s rename our common western dishes to something more comfortable. The following are everything from single ingredients to full courses. See if you can guess what they are, then add a few of your own.
Some that I know of that are cute and descriptive…
Pigs in a Blanket (sausages wrapped in pancakes)
Egg in a Nest (fried egg in a piece of bread)
Baked Alaska (deep fried ice cream)
Beenie Weenies (pork 'n beans and hotdogs)
I don’t think there’s really any disconnect. In addition to the imaginative Western names cited by GargoyleWB, you have Chinese names like “beef and broccoli”, or “shrimp fried rice”. Both cultures have clever names, and both have names that are merely blandly descriptive.
Also, the translations are not always accurate representations of the degree of fanciness of the original name. For example, the name of “twice-cooked pork” in Chinese more closely resembles “back in the pot pork.”
This kind of reminds me of a scene in “The Red Violin”. In the China segment, during a meeting, one person says something that was subtitled “So-and-so speaks with great wisdom.” What she actually said was “So-and-so is very smart.” It’s amusing how much more dignified they made the subtitles.
