This week, I found myself one morning in my pyjamas waiting for potatoes to come up to the boil and pondering upon the difficulties of naming food. I don’t mean pointing at a long yellow fruit (or rather more botanically accurately, herb) and pronouncing it to be a banana but rather giving dishes/meals a name.
I was in my PJ’s cooking because my singing group, The Kettle Girls, would be round that evening for tea and practice and due to being back at the hospital in the afternoon (once again to the Pain Clinic – a name I still find bemusing and think perhaps the word ‘Management’ really does need to be added into the middle), and various other things, there wouldn’t be time to cook later.
After wandering in from heading down the garden to open the greenhouse, MOTH said, “Smells good, what is it?” The only reply I could think of was, “Not-at-all Cottage Pie.”
Cottage Pie is an iconic dish, we all know what it is and despite there being some variants, the main constituents are, as standard. What I was making was Quorn mince, mushroom and chickpeas in an herby vegetable gravy with sweet potato mash on top. Similar enough in end-result-looks (apart from being quite a vivid orange), but if you were to put ‘cottage pie’ on a menu and then serve this up; I think there would be rather a lot of grumbling.
Short of listing all the main ingredients and how they will be presented or put together, it seems tricky to come up with meal names. Growing up we had variations of ‘slop.’ This sounds terrible but it is a term I have continued to use, forgetting that from the outside, it could be considered the least appealing of descriptions. In essence, it just means, something, in some sort of gravy or sauce, for instance: chicken and vegetable slop, mince slop or perhaps, sausage and bean slop. Then, it was either a gravy or tomato choice for the wet part. These things are then accompanied by rice, pasta, cous cous, bread or whatever suits you or the meal best.
And here’s a question: if you have come up with a name that is quite accurate and descriptive, what happens if you change an ingredient? Is this a new meal? Do you need to give it a new name? I am always swapping things about and I more-often-than-not, don’t measure anything, so amounts change each time I cook – this means the dishes I make are often never the same.
Social media regularly throws out images of ridiculous trendy menus which now leave the customer having to guess at not only the price (it would seem it is not ‘cool’ to use the pound sign or decimal points and so you get a generic numeral hovering somewhere about the menu), but also, the food choices are written in such sparse form it’s a bit of pot-luck what you may 
end up with. For example: Chicken 11. This is the extreme-end far removed from the thorough listing of all possible ingredients in a dish.
I really enjoy cooking but I think that if I were to appear on Masterchef, the only round I would stand a chance at would be the invention test and I’m not sure that presenting John and Gregg with a dish called ‘beef slop and rice’ would cut the mustard. But, unless I ever decide to release a cook book; in our household, we will continue to have meals with names that do a job, even if they are not the best.
Click here for my recipe for, ‘Not-at-all Cottage Pie’