- Waiter, I’ll have the Albany beef with monkey gland sauce, and a Cold Duck for dessert.
You’re at a restaurant and order a dish that sounds delicious. But once the waiter brings you your food, whatever’s on the plate is not at all what you imagined.
A while back, we brought you a list of foods and dishes with utterly misleading names. But the thing is, there are so many of them that we had a lot of leftovers.
So, we decided to revisit the topic. Here are another 12 dishes that sound like something they definitely are not.
1. Monkey Bread
Eating monkeys sounds like something they’d make people do on some survival reality show. But monkey bread contains no monkeys, nor is it bread.
You might actually be familiar with monkey bread. This pull-apart, sugar and cinnamon-coated cake is fairly popular thanks to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s penchant for it.
But why is called “monkey bread?” Nobody knows for sure, but some theorize it’s because you pull pieces off the cake and eat them with your fingers like a monkey might.
Somehow, we’re not buying it.
2. Monkey Gland Sauce
The monkey business continues but — just like monkey bread — monkey gland sauce doesn’t contain any glands of any type of monkey. It’s a sweet and tangy South African condiment prepared with chutney, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar.
The origins of the name are murky, but one story claims it originated from disgruntled French chefs at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg. The chefs were outraged by local South Africans adding condiments to their fine French cuisine and created a table condiment by mixing all of the pedestrian sauces they’d seen ruin their food.
They named the mixture “monkey gland sauce” to make their disdain clear. But, as it turned out, locals actually liked the concoction.
3. Cream Crackers
Cream crackers are a popular carrier for cheese, relishes, and other snackable things over in Europe. Despite their name, though, the crackers contain no cream.
The “cream” part comes from their manufacturing process. When making cream crackers, flour, water, and oil are “creamed” to form a smooth, malleable mass.
So, technically, the crackers’ name is accurate. But unless you’re an active baker (and even then) you’ll probably think of dairy cream first.
4. Cold Duck
Cold duck sounds like something you might order at a Chinese restaurant. But you should actually order it at the bar across the street because a Cold Duck is a cocktail featuring red and sparkling wine.
The name supposedly comes from a misheard German phrase. The story claims the after-dinner drink was known as the Kaltes Ende (“cold end”) but a game of telephone over the years turned it into Kalte Ente (“cold duck”).
And that’s the name that got translated into English.
5. Albany Beef
If you’re visiting Albany, New York, be careful when ordering a steak. That’s because Albany beef doesn’t come for a cow, but a sturgeon.
Although sturgeons are now rare in the Hudson River, they used to be so plentiful in the 1800s that they formed a huge part of local diets. People ate them like Americans elsewhere ate beef, so the fish came to be known as “Albany beef.”
6. Sweetbread
Sweetbread sounds like a delightful treat, doesn’t it? Now, they are good, but you’ll be sorely disappointed if you’re expecting taste baked goods.
“Sweetbread” is a culinary name for an animal’s thymus and/or pancreas, typically from a calf or lamb. The word has been used for centuries, but it’s unclear where it came from.
One possibility is that the “sweet” part refers to the thymus’ lightly sweeter taste compared to muscle meat. The “bread,” meanwhile, could come from “brede,” which meant “roast meat” in 16th-century English.
7. Geoduck
Alright, Cold Duck wasn’t duck at all, but what about geoduck? Well, first of all, you pronounced it wrong — it’s “gooey duck,” for some reason.
Also, it’s not a bird. Geoducks are huge clams that are particularly popular in Chinese and Asian cuisines.
They’re quite distinctive-looking because of their long siphons. We’ll leave it up to your imagination what they resemble.
8. Duck Sauce
Fine! After all these fake ducks, at least duck sauce must contain-… It doesn’t have any duck in it, does it?
It indeed doesn’t. This sauce, an enduring favorite at Chinese restaurants, is made from sugar, vinegar, ginger, chili, and a variety of fruits ranging from apricots to plums and peaches.
The condiment is called duck sauce because it goes well with duck dishes. It’s not a sauce from duck, it’s a sauce for duck.
9. Russian Dressing
So, where did Russian dressing originate? If you guessed Russia, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Russian dressing is as American as apple pie or oversized pick-up trucks. This Thousand Island-like salad dressing was invented in the U.S. in the early 1900s.
It got its name because the original hoity-toity recipe called for caviar. And since caviar actually is strongly associated with Russia, the dressing derived its name from the connection.
10. Lion’s Head
Have you ever wondered what it might be like to devour the head of a big cat? Well, you’ll be left still wondering if you order a Lion’s Head at a Chinese restaurant.
Instead of a disembodied lion’s head, the dish consists of large pork or beef meatballs served with various vegetable products. The white (or plain) variant is often served with napa cabbage or bok choy, while the red (stewed with soy sauce) type comes with bamboo shoots and tofu.
11. Toad in the Hole
The British Isles are chock-full of foods with utterly bizarre names, like spotted dick. Another odd one in the bunch is toad in the hole.
There are no amphibians in this dish, though. Toad in the hole is prepared by baking sausages in a Yorkshire pudding batter.
Historically, other types of meat, like cheap beef cuts, could be used as well. The name has also varied over the years, sometimes depending on the kind of meat used.
12. Grasshopper Pie
Would you dare eat a pie made out of grasshoppers? If not, we have good news for you — you shouldn’t find any bugs in a grasshopper pie.
Instead, the pie crust is filled with typically light green whipped cream and cream cheese or marshmallow. The color usually stems from crème de menthe used to give the pie its minty flavor.
The name actually stems from the Grasshopper cocktail, which is also green and made with crème de menthe. So, if you find a grasshopper in your pie, you can try to take comfort in the fact that it at least wasn’t supposed to be there.