Stupid things food people say and/or do, and ordinary people say about food and/or do with food.

Language & nomenclature

Fish pasta

I have just seen a recipe (sent in an unwanted email) for “monkfish pasta”. This is a stupid misnomer; it should be called “monkfish and pasta” because the recipe is basically this: cook some fish; cook some pasta; put them together and serve.

Wholemeal pasta is pasta made with wholemeal flour. Tomato pasta is pasta made with tomato paste so that the actual spaghetti or noodles or whatever is tomato red; the same for whatever they use (spinach?) in the green pasta you can also buy dried. For the name “monkfish pasta” to be appropriate, the recipe would have needed to be: take some fish and purée it; take some flour etc. and mix with the fish then put through a pasta making machine to produce the fresh, fishy pasta; then cook said fishy pasta and serve.

TV cook jargon

These people, who are obviously not very bright (intelligent or witty) say lots of stupid things not specifically related to food, just like everybody else who talks without thinking — who, as we say, “engages mouth without switching on brain”. These include the ghastly clichés and banalities of expression typical of footballers with microphones pointed at them (and of course one unjustifiably celebrated TV cook is an ex footballer, with all the lack of finesse and powers of expression of such people), including

Fatuous usages unique to cooking (but no longer, probably limited to TV cooking) include: