It happened when I went to the Veneto region for work. One of my coworkers suggested that we go to a nearby trattoria for lunch. They said that the dessert there was fabulous, but that we would have a bit of trouble ordering it. I couldn’t imagine why they were hesitating over a simple dessert order, but I didn’t say anything. They went on to say, “Knowing your sweet tooth, you’ve definitely got to try this delicious traditional confection.” They explained that because it wasn’t on the menu, we couldn’t just point to it to order—we had to actually speak the name of the pastry to get it. There was simply no way around it.
The name of the pastry was puttana. Prostitute.
I could now understand the hesitation around saying “I’d like a prostitute, please” to order it!
I asked them how in the world this pastry got such a provocative name, but apparently, it wasn’t always such a pejorative term. I learned that it was a name that signaled poverty and the way of life associated with it.
The puttana doesn’t have a set recipe—it’s a pastry made from whatever happens to be on hand. Dried fruit, flour, sugar, milk—sometimes even cornflower—are mixed together and baked. The flavor and look of it are different every time. The peasants back then had no qualms about referring to this mixed-up, chaotic confection as puttana—it was simply a way to signal it as something thrown together. In other words, the name had no moral commentary attached to it. It just hid a story that expressed certain conditions.
After we ordered our puttana, the conversation around the table got increasingly lively as we started talking about other scandalously-named foods from around Italy. In Southern Italy, for example, there is a pastry called tette delle monache, or nun’s breasts. They look exactly as you’d expect, inviting giggles mixed with a splash of dark humor in a way that’s so very Italian. It’s a dessert that you wouldn’t just hesitate to order—I imagine you’d have to rally yourself again to bite into it.
They asked me if Japan had any scandalously-named treats, so I rushed to look some up. I realized that we do have some regional foods that baldly express their shape or how they are made—like belly-button mochi, chinsuko (which sounds like a reference to male anatomy, though there are competing stories about the origin of the word), oppai-manju (“breast buns”), and kingyokuto, which doesn’t sound scandalous, though the characters used to write it could be read a different way as slang for male anatomy. But even these names are all apparently rooted in some aspect of everyday life.
In a world where everything is becoming more branded and refined, it seems like these very human, down-to-earth names are gradually disappearing—even though they are cultural artifacts that tell us something about a different time, with different values and different ways of life.
