WAIE (whatamieating.com)


This is the searchable online international food dictionary with – so far – 61,500 terms in 302 languages (I have just added some Isan) plus 12,690 plurals.

Just type in the word that you're looking for and press enter or click on search. There are other types of search; see search help for more information.

Most Recent Upload: 6th December 2009

The amazing Mariana Kavroulaki has done an amazing job on proof-reading the Greek list, and it is now up to more than 1,500, plus plurals, with 1,470 showing the Greek alphabet rendition as well as the English transliteration.

A few weeks ago I spent an extraordinary couple of days in a food market in Laos, where I photographed huge numbers of foods I had never even glimpsed before. Jungle fruits and insects, furry leaves and vines, roots and tubers, fish artistically arranged alongside chickens (one of the few foodstuffs I recognised!) and the occasional rat. A young woman called Noy, whose other names I do not know, has been working through the images and e-mailing me to identify them for me, giving me the Lao name, and the transliterated name, and a description in English. From these and my other sources, not least the wonderful, but late, Alan Davidson, I have managed to give a formal identification to them. These I am slowly adding. I am having trouble transferring the Lao alphabet terms, but it will happen in due course. Jane is finding a way round this problem for me. As ever!

Please do let us know if you see any errors, broken links or pictures. Some of the changes I am making may lead to this happening and it would help if you could let us know.

Welcome to the new people who have joined the Facebook group. (Facebook group) If you would like to join, you will get occasional updates about what has been added to to the site.

I am mainly working on improvements to the site at the moment. This is a long job and entry of new food terms will happen much more quickly once this structural work is done.

Description: The regions of Italy produce foods which differ enormously. It is a purely regional cuisine.

Frequently, the foreigner’s view of Italian cuisine is that it consists of pasta, such as spaghetti Bolognese, and pizza, with one or two well-known meat dishes, such as osso buco or bistecca (alla) fiorentina, thrown in, perhaps with bruschetta to start with. In Italy you will find ‘international restaurants’. These are not restaurants serving foods from around the world but restaurants catering for the tastes of foreigners. These will serve the commonly accepted famous dishes of Italy without regard to the regional nature of the cuisine.

Most cooking in restaurants is both regionally and seasonally based. In the north you are more likely to be served dishes which involve dairy produce, using butter rather than oil, often cream or mascarpone cheese. In the south these will be replaced with olive oil. Tuscany lurks on the border of this decision and produces so much high quality oil that it is used in place of dairy foods. It also uses white butter beans in soups, stews and salads. Naples and Sicily are renowned for their fish and their pizzas, Emilia-Romagna for a wonderful cuisine but particularly its stuffed pastas. Emilia-Romagna is also the home of Parma ham and Parmesan cheese. Genoa in Liguria is rightly famous for pesto, Rome for unweaned, milk-fed lamb (abbacchio) and Lombardy for bresaola. And so it goes on. We recommend that you click on the region of interest under 'See places' below to help you to find out about local foods and dishes.

In the north, the proximity of the French border has some influence on the cooking, though it is thought that actually it was cooks from the north of Italy travelling into France who created the basis of their great cuisine. Perhaps it was the influence of Italy on France rather than the other way round.

So far, I have made some 9,900 entries in Italian, but you can bet that the item you are searching for is not among them. If this is the case, please e-mail queries@whatamieating.com and I will try to respond with the information you need.