What Isn’t in a Name?

Once upon a time, a menu would list green salad, maybe hearts of romaine salad. If a dish were much more elaborate, it might have a conventional name such as Caesar salad, which implied a particular recipe. This was particularly so in haute cuisine, in which many dishes had names like “entreco^te Rossini” and “glace Nesselrode.”

But then came nouvelle cuisine and the celebration of originality, and dish names started to read like recipes--”baby green salad in a balsamic-roasted sesame vinaigrette” and that sort of thing. And these days, there’s so much emphasis on premium ingredients that some menus read like farmers market shopping lists.

It always seems a little peculiar, because this sort of detail is really the kind of thing that would make you decide whether to go to a restaurant in the first place. Once you’re there, though, you’re stuck with whatever treatment the restaurant applies to its steak or salad or whatever, so all the detail is kind of numbing.

Still, long dish names are not new--and neither is making fun of them. The 2nd century Greek book “The Deipnosophists” gets a giggle out of some names so complex that scholars have debated about how to translate them. “Psaistelaioxanthepipankapyrotos khoirinas” might mean “the ground-meal-fried-golden-brown- and-crispy-on-all- sides-in-olive-oil cake.”

And then there’s “pyrobromoleukerebinthoakanthidomikritriadybromatopantanamikton,” apparently “the wheat-oat-eggwhite- garbanzo-bean-thistle-little-sesame- oil-and-honey-crepes-all -mixed-together-dish.”

Some chefs are probably kicking themselves that they can’t write their menus in classical Greek.