Culinary names, menu names, or kitchen names are names of foods used in the preparation or selling of food, as opposed to their names in agriculture or in scientific nomenclature. The menu name may even be different from the kitchen name. For example, from the 19th until the mid-20th century, many restaurant menus were written in French and not in the local language. Examples include veal (calf), calamari (squid), and sweetbreads (pancreas or thymus gland). Culinary names are especially common for fish and seafood, where multiple species are marketed under a single familiar name.

Examples

Foods may come to have distinct culinary names for a variety of reasons:

Humor and ethnic dysphemism

Humorous exaltation often takes the form of a dysphemism disparaging particular groups or places. It has been observed that "Celtic dishes seem to receive more than their share of humorous names in English cookbooks". Many of these are now considered offensive. See List of foods named after places for foods named after their actual place of origin.