How did these terms come about? What are the differences between Canadian and American descriptions? Other differences are: A Bloody Mary and a Bloody Caeser; the description of ‘chips’ vs ‘fries’.
In describing food - I wonder how us Canadians and you Americans began to call the same foods by different names?
Before you start worrying about the divisions between folks in Canada and the U.S., you should probably come to grips with the fact that the terms differ within the U.S.
Pop is found most frequently in the Northern dialect: New York, some sections along the Ohio shores of Lake Erie, Michigan, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and into Minnesota.
Soda is found in the Northern Middle Dialect, just to the South of the regions named.
Farther South, the terms take on a number of changes. In addition, New England does not necessarily use the same terms as other regions. And once one gets to the Mississippi River, the dialects start blending and mixing depending on which territory was settled by which groups immigrating from either the Eastern U.S. or Europe.
For the Northern U.S. Dialect (as experienced in Southeast Michigan), a float is a glass of pop with a scoop of ice cream in it. If you add milk and chocolate syrup to a float, it becomes a black cow. A shake is icecream (or soft cream) and milk shaken into a frosty slurry and a malt (rare since the demise of drug store fountain counters) is a shake with malted milk as a primary ingredient.
Hmm, Here in Chicago a black cow is another name for a root beer float, i.e. a glass of root beer with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it. A shake is blended ice cream and milk and if it has malt extract added to it, it’s then called a malt.
I’ve never seen a a float with milk added to it. It sounds nasty till I think about the ice cream melting and then I guess it’s not a problem.
The fried potato wedges that are traditionally served with hamburgers are usually called “Fries” in both countries, unless they’re served with battered fish. If you walk into a Canadian restaurant and look at the menu, French fries are usually called fries, not chips - again, except as the dish “Fish and chips.” The British, on the other hand, always call French fries “chips,” and they call potato chips (e.g. the snack food Hostess sells) “crisps.”
A Bloody Mary and a Caesar are not the same drink. A Bloody Mary is made with tomato juice; a Caesar is made with CLAMATO juice. It’s definitely a Canadian thing, but it’s actually a different drink, not just a different turn of phrase.
As to soda vs. pop, I think they’re regional terms, not necessarily national. I’ve noticed Minnesotans seem to say “pop.” I’ve also encountered the phenomenon of Southerners calling all soda/pop drinks “coke” even when it’s not even cola.
I went to elementary school in Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. It was soda or sodapop. Some people called all carbonated beverages “coke” with Coca-Cola being “Co-cola”, but that was a sign of being from the country, like calling laundry “warsh”.
When I moved to Utah at age 11 I was surprized that everyone called it pop and not as an affectation. I still call it soda.
Western Canadian here: although I recognize the term “Bloody Caesar”, everyone refers to it simply as a Caesar. To the unitiatiated a disgusting drink, they become a convert with one sip*!
I grew up in the Pittsburgh area with the word “pop”. When I moved a few hundred miles east to Philadelphia, I had to master a change to “soda”. After four years of “soda” it was a little tough to go back to “pop” when I moved back to the western end of PA.
In Philly groceries went into a “sack”, while in Pittsburgh it is a “bag”. Don’t even get me started on “gumband” and “rubber band”.
In Philly, we called it soda. My wife, from NY also called it soda and it is the same in Montreal. Can’t speak for any other place in Canada. The biggest difference is what is meant by a “chocolate soda”. To me, that is chocolate syrup with seltzer, like any other soda. To my wife is means what I would call a “chcocolate ice cream soda”. After some discussion at cross purposes, it turned out that she had no words to describe my chocolate soda. Except maybe ask for a “chocolate soda, hold the ice cream”.
Then there is the NY “egg cream” that lacks both egg and cream, but I have forgotten what it does contain.
Incidentally, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the name “soda” comes from the fact that a small amount of sodium carbonate is added to increase the solubility of CO2.
> If you walk into a Canadian restaurant and look at the menu, French fries are
> usually called fries, not chips - again, except as the dish “Fish and chips.”
In the U.S., it’s also the case that when a menu offers this dish as one item, it’s nearly always called “fish and chips,” despite the fact that it’s French fries in any other case. It’s more of a cafeteria item (or occasionally a fast-food item) than a sit-down restaurant item. It seems to me that there’s a subtext when this item is called this that it’s a deliberate echo of the fact that it’s thought of as a British food item. Similarly, in the U.K., the fast-food restaurants that are part of U.S. chains put “French fries” on their menu, not “chips,” and this is a deliberate echo of American speech.
As a non-New Yorker, that is one concept I’ve never gotten. In grade school, I read a juvenile novel set in New York that talked about getting an egg cream at a drugstore soda fountain. (Walgreen’s?) I knew nothing in my world that could connect to this concept, except for a large chocolate cream Easter egg I had recently devoured, the only confection I knew that used both words. When I learned that the New York “egg cream” has nothing to do with either word, I gave up trying to make sense of it. I chalked it up to my observation that some people have a weak grasp of logic in their use of language. Either that, or the naming was an act of deliberate guerrilla linguistic satire
to dethrone logic.
An egg cream is chocolate syrup and seltzer water (or “two cents plain” as it was once known in NYC). I’m never heard anyone in NYC refer to anything but “soda.” Pop is more of a mid-Western term.
Then there’s the whole submarine/hero/hoagie/grinder thing.