I have decided to now post my Blogs once a month rather than once a week. I promise to continue to make them light and enlightening. You can expect my next Blog entry the first week in April. Peace, Love & Tofu to all of you, Linda JOY

WHAT IS IN A NAME?

FOODS NAMED AFTER INVENTIONS

          Mother Nature must have a real sense of humor. She gave us not only such unlikely animals as penguins, porcupines and kangaroos, but she also gave us foods that we would later rename after we humans had invented foods that they reminded us of! This week I have been thinking about two different foods named after human inventions: Spaghetti Squash and Ice Cream Bananas.

          Take the case of Spaghetti Squash, for example, that wonderful oval pale yellow squash which, when cut in half and the seeds removed, and then steamed or baked, becomes like spaghetti strands. All you need to do is to comb it lengthwise with a fork to break it up into “noodles”. It is then ready to either serve alone with pasta sauce, or to mix with whole-grain pasta and veggies, with sauce piled on top, to replicate a big bowl of steaming-hot pasta!  Spaghetti is reported to have been invented either by the Chinese or the Italians, depending on whose story you are listening to, somewhere around the time of Marco Polo, a 13^th-century explorer from Venice, Italy. Before that, was Spaghetti Squash called “string” squash, “little worm” squash, or what?

          What about Ice Cream Bananas? I am referring to those special delicious little bananas that resemble vanilla ice cream and seem to melt in your mouth the way ice cream does. Early forms of ice cream had been enjoyed by royalty for many centuries, and flavored ices had been eaten in China as early as 3000 b.c.. In both cases, at least according to lore, it involved the servants running up into the mountains to gather snow or to freeze flavored and sweetened cream, and then running quickly back down to present it to the emperor or king before it could totally melt!  (And to think that I complain if the So Delicious soy ice cream on my cone begins to melt before I have a chance to lick it up!) But the common people in France did not know much about ice cream until the first ice cream parlor was opened in Paris in 1670 by a Sicilian. In the New World ice cream began to be known and enjoyed by the middle class when the first ice cream parlor opened in 1776. Before that, did people call Ice Cream Bananas another name? Perhaps they called them “melt-in-your-mouth” bananas.

INVENTED NEW NAMES FOR FOOD

          I believe that the names we give to food are important, especially when we are introducing them to our children.  When I was young, I did not like squash because of my association with the word “squash”, as in: “Eww! A SQUASHED BUG!” 

          I remembered that, and later, when my own children were young, I had fun giving squash new names such as “MELLOW YELLOW” for yellow summer squash. Zucchini got to keep its pretty name, but I left off the “s” word from other squashes, so that Acorn squash became “ACORN DISH” (my kids later told me that they thought I was saying it was “a corn dish”)! Butternut squash was called simply “BUTTERNUTTY”, and Hubbard squash was “MOTHER HUBBARD”. My children enjoyed these fun and interesting veggies that added variety to our meals.

          I also love other fun names some foods have been given, such as “SNICKERDOODLE”, those wonderful cinnamon cookies I used to bake for the family. My youngest son always pronounced pancakes as “PAN-A-CAKES” and the name stuck. Years later, we still say, “Would you like some ‘pan-a-cakes?’” When I would make Ratatouille, my sons liked to call it “RA-TA-TA-TA-TOOEY”, with that loud machine gun imagery, so that is what I, as a foodie AND “wordie” (word lover), still call it today!

          Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s light-hearted blog. See you next week!