How to Make Up a Fancy Foreign Name for Any Food - Your Ticket to Culinary Stardom!

In the last two master classes we looked at the basics of developing fancy, impressive-sounding names for your every-day culinary creations. Today we graduate to the advanced level: foreign languages. There is a rich history of impressing people using foreign languages in food names. The person who can flawlessly rattle an order off the menu of an Indian or Japanese restaurant automatically goes up a notch or two in the eyes of everyone at the table. Many snobby gourmet restaurants, which have to impress incredibly rich, bored people on a regular basis, resort to using entire phrases of French or Italian. Today you will learn to do the same, to all appearances.

The first step is almost too obvious. Any time you use an ingredient with a name in another language, use the name in the other language. You're slicing baguettes, not French bread. You sauteed shiitake, not mushrooms. (Note that Japanese words don't get an 's' on the end in the plural. Now you're a cut above the crowd.) Be specific with pasta varieties. Anybody can cook noodles or pasta or macaroni. You, on the other hand, are in the BPG master class. You cook linguine and fettuccine and farfalle and rotini and, if you're lucky, cavatappi. Say it with an accent! Say it with hand gestures! Also, you should know that the only respectable way to eat pasta is ever-so-slightly raw in the center. If you manage this (which is not hard), tack on an al dente on the end.

In the last lesson we learned about red and white sauces. Time for an upgrade. From now on "anything in a descriptive red sauce" is anything marinara descrittivo. "Anything in a descriptive white sauce" is anything alfredo descrittivo. If you don't know any Italian adjectives, just stick with descrittivo - it sounds good and Italian and will do the trick nicely. Note that in things like Italian and French the adjectives go afterward.