This is mainly a blog I put out about 10 years ago on this site.
I just recently put it up on the facebook page of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery:

Because there is a strong tradition of using French as the language of professional food there always has been a tendency to get the French words wrong in menus.
Somehow the translations never quite work.
Dutch Sauce does not sound like it would have anything of the buttery richness redolent in “Sauce Hollandaise”, something called “Skewered Lamb Nuts” doesn’t have the same ring as “Noisettes d’Agneau en Brochettes” and one would not wonder at Profiteroles made from “Cabbage paste” not having the same airy lightness as those made from “Pate A Choux.”
To compound out difficulties the naming of dishes in France has quite often been done by people whose love of the food they were producing was often to lead them close to poetry.
A fresh green herb sauce for fish is known as “Sauce Vert Pre” –green meadow sauce, a simple butter and lemon garnish for Trout or Sole is known as “A la Belle Meuniere”-in the style of the beautiful millers wife.
Because of the supposed soporific effect of Lettuce, soup made from that plant was called “Potage Pere Tranquille” or a soup to quieten Father. This has always brought to mind our own (Irish) folk song ;The Spinning Wheel.
In the song the mother was sent to sleep by the hum of the spinning wheel as spun by her daughter aware of her lover waiting outside the window, the French daughter of course relied on food to quieten Father, and fed him on lettuce soup before making her escape. The effect however is the same in both;
“Noiseless and light to the lattice above her
The maid steps, then leaps to the arms of her lover.”
But for pure poetry I have to go back to my cookery muse, Elizabeth David.
In French Provincial Cooking she names a melon Ice cream “Glace au Melon de l’Isle St. St Jacques” because:
“The melon has a strange almost magic flavour and that is why I have called it after that French Caribbean Island so unforgettebly conjured out of the ocean, only to be once more submerged, by Patrick Leigh Fermor in “The Violins of St Jacques”.
The French nomenclature has left us with a very useful shorthand of typical garnishes for foods. We can all be pretty sure that “A La Provencal” will contain at least tomatoes and possibly garlic and black olives as well. Dishes served “A La Lyonnaise “ will contain onions. “A La Bourguignonne” will certainly contain red wine, “Normandie” cream, with a strong possibility of apples or cider.
They did not however stop at naming dishes after their own provinces.
We have already mentioned the Dutch, the Italians were, for some reason given “A garnish of chopped Mushrooms” The Hungarians, more understandably Paprika. A l’Indienne is the French description of a Curry which is one example of them getting the name right but never quite managing to perfect the spicing. I always think that the English have a much better handle on this dish than the French, probably because of their stronger colonial background in India.
The French however gave the British very little credit for culinary expertise, “A l’Anglais” refers to something boiled in water.
The Germans and Spaniards fared much better, the former having a classic Veloute sauce enriched with egg yolks and cream named in their honour, the latter having Sauce Espagnol, one of the great Sauces Meres of French cooking called after them. One can search in vain in the Larousse Gastronimique for an “A l’Irlandaise. We can however make a tenuous connection with Mayonnaise, supposedly first prepared for a certain General Mahon by his chef. Definitely a man of Irish extraction.
Talking of Irish extraction it is very interesting to note that we can claim to have a half share in the Swedish royal house.
Napoleon’s marshal Bernadotte was tactically granted the Swedish throne by the Swedish people when their monarch died without heir. The same Bernadotte had married Desire Clary, an old squeeze of Bonies, who’s parents were involved in the silk trade in Marseilles and were originally Clearys from the west of Ireland.
To get back to the point, the problems involved in getting the French names correct on our menus often gives us amazing dishes.
I have seen the “belle meuniere” mentioned above offered as “Sole Manure”,and, in the sixties, when they were still a novelty, a friend was offered “Koo-Jets” in a Kilkenny restaurant. She was delighted when they turned out to be courgettes. Another friend when she requested a “Mille Feuille” pronounced in the French manner was gently corrected by a waitress who told her it was a “Milly Filly”, I’m not at all sure that that wasn’t an improvement.
But my own two favourite pieces of menu mistakes come from the time when I was working as a waiter in Barley Cove Hotel in West Cork.
Seeing the giggles of a table of city people one lunch time I discovered that the reception had gotten the “Buttered Peas” on the vegetable offerings wrong, somebody’s finger had slipped down a line and they had become “Buggered Peas”- the mind boggles!
However the same typist bettered even that when , the following week,one of the desserts on offer was the wonderful option;
“Lemon Meringue Piss”.