Ever wonder where the quirky names of some popular (and perhaps not-so-popular) foods come from? Turns out, they’re often meant to cover up some sort of “ick” factor (see head cheese, below), but they also have to do with how the dish is prepared. Before you order up bubble and squeak with a side of sweetbreads and a dessert of chess pie, learn what’s going into your dishes and where the names come from.
Boston cream pie
Boston cream pie is, in fact, from Boston. It’s believed to have been invented by a French chef at the Parker House Hotel, where the dessert remains on the menu today. That said, it’s not a pie — it’s a cake. It has no crust, and it’s made from a sponge recipe featuring eggs, sugar, and flour, but apparently it was called a pie because pie pans used to be more readily available than cake pans, so the original dessert was likely baked in a pie pan.
Chess pie
This one really is a pie, but it has nothing to do with the board game. Chess pie is a simple dessert made from ingredients you likely already have on hand: eggs, milk, butter, and sugar. While we’re certain it’s unrelated to the game, the true name origin is murky. Some suggest it’s a mispronunciation of “cheese,” as the recipe could be a colonial American adaptation of cheesecake. Others say it’s really “chest” pie, with the “chest” in question being the pantry or ice box — where all of those recipe ingredients are likely already in store.
Bubble and squeak
Bubble and squeak is — perhaps unsurprisingly from a nation that also gave us “toad in the hole” and “spotted dick” as the names of dishes — a British dish consisting of mixed vegetables, but almost always potatoes and cabbage. The name comes from the way the dish is prepared — the vegetables are pan-fried, and given the high water content of cabbage, it makes a lot of noise in a hot frying pan.
Head cheese
Head cheese isn’t what we think of as cheese at all, but it does come from heads — pig heads, to be exact. It’s really more of a head “loaf.” It’s a traditional Southern dish prepared by stewing a pig’s head in a stock pot with vegetables, aromatics, and seasoning, and then picking the meat, stuffing it into sausage casing, and chilling it overnight. So why is it called “cheese”? When this process of preparing food was popularized in the 1700s, the word “cheese” didn’t refer to dairy, but rather to the process of forming ingredients into a loaf and chilling them until solid.
Egg cream
An egg cream is an old-fashioned drink that originated in the Jewish communities of New York City in the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s made by mixing milk and soda water and flavoring it with syrup — no eggs, no cream. Linguists suggest that the name may be a corruption of the Yiddish expression echt keem, meaning “pure sweetness.”
Plum pudding
Plum pudding is a British holiday delicacy also known as Christmas pudding, or sometimes figgy pudding — it’s baked with a combination of dried fruits steeped in brandy. It doesn’t have to include plums in it, however. The name comes from the Victorian practice of substituting dried plums for other dried fruits, such as raisins or currants. Because prunes were so popular, any good that contained dried fruits was described as “plum.”
Sweetbreads
“Sweetbreads,” we must admit, is a bit of a euphemism — “thymus” and “pancreas” just don’t sound as appetizing. This butcher cut refers to the two glands harvested (usually) from calves or lambs — the thymus, near the throat, and the pancreas, near the stomach. Both have a mildly mineral, slightly sweet flavor. The term dates back to the 16th century, when an English book called The Historie of Many described the thymus as “most pleasant to be eaten… the sweete bread.” In this context, “bread” is a modernized equivalent of the Old English bræd, a term for animal flesh.
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