Gourmet glossary
When is a raviolo not a raviolo? One of my pedantic dummy spits is over menus that misuse culinary terms to bastardise their meanings either through ignorance or in a misleading attempt to dress things up—terms like salsa sauce, confits that aren’t confits and so on. Take ravioli for example. We all know that it means those small filled pockets of pasta. Then, as the description moved out of Italian eateries into the mainstream, we began seeing menus listing raviolo and learned that it meant one, usually larger, pillow while also, if you were so inclined, learning the difference between the plural and singular masculine noun endings in Italian. So if you order a raviolo of crayfish from a menu and it comes as crayfish sandwiched between two flat sheets of tomato jelly, rather than in a pasta pocket, are you disappointed? The restaurant has obviously called it raviolo because it sounds sexier than sandwich, but have you been misled? Probably. Certainly it’s not what most of us would reasonably expect. Sunday Tasmanian, April 27.
