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: Paste. This can mean either pasta, noodles in all their forms, dough, pastry, cake or biscuit (US: cookie). As in English, it can also describe the paste of a cheese. Pasta as we know it seems to have arisen in Sicily during the Middle Ages and is traditionally made with durum wheat ground into semolina, mixed to a paste with water and then forced through different types of nozzles to create different shapes. It may contain eggs.Pasta is boiled and served with a sauce of some kind and is a traditional first course in Italy, or is cooked in a soup. When "pasta" is used as a prefix to a named dish it usually indicates a short pasta or maccheroni of some sort. It a longer pasta is to be used it will normally be specified, as in, say, spaghetti alla carbonara. Most pasta is bought dried, rather than fresh and, for those who like al dente pasta, it is often the best. Stuffed pasta, and so on, are the most varied of the pasta dishes and each part of Italy has its own recipes. In the north thie stuffings are predominantly meat while, in the south and coastal areas, they will be based on vegetables and fish. Una pasta is a small cake or pastry.