“London broil” I’ve found to be a nebulous term that means different things in different places to different people. Wikipedia says this:
“London broil” originally referred to broiled flank steak, although modern butchers may label top round, coulotte, or other cuts as “London broil”, and the term has come to refer more to a method of preparation and cookery than to a specific cut of meat.[3]
What they sell at my grocery here in Chicago as “London Broil” is definitely not flank – that they sell separately at a higher price point. Similar are terms like “pot roast” – for me, that should be “chuck,” but I have no idea what cut “pot roast” is to the people that label it as such. It doesn’t really label a cut so much as the method it is intended for, I guess. Then there’s “Delmonico” which could any of several cuts, as well.
There’s the recent trend of “diet” soft drinks being rebranded as “zero sugar”. Apparently part of the reason for that is that some men won’t buy anything labeled “diet” because they consider them to be for women.
I’m guessing this thread was mainly intended to be about foods and beverages since it was started in Cafe Society, but I can think of some examples where the same sort of thing has been done with cars:
The Plymouth Volare / Dodge Aspen got a reputation for being unreliable. Let’s restyle them and call them the Plymouth Gran Fury / Dodge Diplomat / Chrysler Fifth Avenue! By that point Chrysler had solved most of the reliability problems. I’m not sure if they were particularly great cars, but they weren’t as bad as their predecessors.
By the end of the Vega’s run GM fixed the oil consumption problems by adding iron sleeves to the cylinders. But the Vega had such a bad reputation by then no one was buying them anymore. So they reskinned it and called it the Monza.
I think it’s come to be referred to as the cooking method, but when I was a kid, flank steak was always what London broil was. It’s morphed and become amorphous.
Funny, every time I ever ordered London broil in a restaurant, it was flank steak. I’ve never seen it with any other cut – until recently, when, for some reason, they make it with different cuts. They make an inferior London broil, but I guess if you’ve never had the real thing, you wouldn’t notice.
Odd, I have had a coulotte and a strip steak served in the fashion of a London broil. A lot of good restaurants don’t want to serve substandard cuts even when traditional. Considering the dish was first publicized in 1931 and people have been talking about it not always being flank steak since at least the mid 1960’s I’m really not sure about “recently”. That was way before my time.
That does not change the fact that they came up with a way to sell flank steak by selling it under another name. And I do agree about the use of better cuts, easier to cut, but not as tasty.
IIRC that’s how tri-tip (A cut of meat that’s still not very well known outside of California) came to be. Most butchers would just grind up that triangular shaped piece of meat from the bottom of the sirloin for hamburger. Then one butcher in the 1950s decided to try putting a spice rub on it and roasting it, and it proved popular.
In the 2000s public opinion and media here in Germany widely decried the use of Analogkäse (the name as well as the substance - cheese analogs using fats and proteins cheaper than those from milk) in cheap pizzas etc. The term Analogkäse was eventually banned as being deceptive.
Nowadays the food industry sells the same thing as veganer Käse (vegan cheese), at a premium. Go figure.
Years ago I had an extremely tasty dish of clams in a restaurant. The menu listed them as “varnish clams”.
I’ve hunted for them ever since, and have discovered that marketing people have renamed them “savoury clams”. The word “varnish” didn’t refer to their flavor, but to fact that the interiors of the shells were glossy purple, as though they had been varnished. Still not a appetite-inducing word.
But I haven’t been able to find savoury clams, either.
