Same Exact Food But Named Differently
I got a charge reading the comments to Tim Weisberg's Facebook post about snacking on Greek stuffed grape leaves. Unknowingly, Tim opened Pandora's Box of people calling the same food by different names.
One person insisted they were called dolmas, which is the Turkish name, and another said they were dolmades, which is how many Greeks refer to them.
I can usually tell what part of Greece someone is from by what they call a food. All my life, I've always called them yaprakia.
That got me thinking about the same foods having different names. Are they pancakes, griddle cakes, flapjacks, hot cakes or johnny cakes?
We call them cookies here, but they're biscuits in the UK.
Here in New England, your ice cream is topped with jimmies, but in other parts they're sprinkles and elsewhere, they're called nonpareils, if you can pronounce it.
Is Cape Verde's national dish manchup or cachupa?
I can't imagine anyone around here ordering a Vienna sausage for a hot dog, or telling your server you'll have baked stuffed prawns, even if they are technically a different species.
Ask anyone who travels, and they'll tell you what we call a bell pepper is known as a capsicum, and oatmeal is known as porridge in Ireland and the UK.
We hold french fries in high esteem in America, but they're called chips in the UK and frites in French-speaking countries.
In all honesty, it wasn't until I moved to the South that I found out what the accepted name was in Arkansas and Louisiana. I've always called them the heels, but local folks referred to them as "the nose," not the booty, knobby or tush. In fact, the Australians sparked a heated debate on social media over what they typically call the ends of a loaf of bread, and there were a lot of turf wars.
What do you call the end pieces, and do you eat them?
Anyway you slice it, someone will probably be around to tell you that you're saying it wrong.