Revolting Names for Delicious Dishes

From 'spicy fried fly heads' in China to our own 'toad in the hole', what's the least appetizing name for a dish you've encountered?
Browsing a menu during a recent visit to Taipei, the name of one particular dish leapt out at me: "spicy fried fly heads". I ordered it, and sure enough, it did look as though a few flies had fallen into the wok, visually ruining an otherwise delightful stir-fry of flowering chives with minced pork and chilli. However, the "fly heads" were fermented black soya beans used to give the chives a bolt of umami flavour, and the dish, served in the Five Dime restaurant, was delicious. It was the first time I'd eaten spicy fly heads, but it reminded me of the "squashed fly" biscuits I ate as a child, in which dark, squishy currants were sandwiched between rectangles of sweet pastry.Familiarity usually blinds us to the revolting names of favourite dishes. "Toad in the hole", for example, might not be the first choice of a foreign tourist struggling to read an English menu, but every Brit thinks of it simply as sausages baked in a batter pudding. Nigella Lawson may invite her readers to thrill and horrify children at a Halloween Party with newly-invented recipes entitled "blood clots" and "pus", but who blinks at a Bloody Mary cocktail with its allusions to vampirism and a monarch who burned hundreds of people at the stake? And while most westerners are appalled by the consumption of dog meat in parts of East Asia, does anyone think twice about scoffing a hot dog?Some foods are named after human body parts, including ladies' fingers, for okra, nipples of Venus (Capezzoli di Venere) for an Italian sweetmeat, and ladies' thighs (kadınbudu köftesi), for a Turkish minced-meat kebab. Most such dishes seem to be inspired by the female anatomy: don't we ever eat men?There are names that sound offensive in one culture but not in another, like the Sichuanese "Pock-Marked Old Woman's Tofu" (mapo tofu). The Chinese tend to take a no-nonsense approach to personal remarks (my Chinese friends often greet me with a cheery smile and the exclamation: "ni pang le!" - you've really fattened up!). Calling a dish after a woman's disfiguring facial scars is meant, and said, affectionately. "Ants climbing a tree" (mayi shangshu), a tangle of beanthread noodles speckled with ant-like morsels of minced pork, is another Sichuanese dish that might not sound too appealing to foreigners who haven't been won over by Noma's appetiser of real, live ants.And then there's just bad taste. One dish I learned to make at cooking school in Sichuan consisted of a sliced pork and vegetables in a scalding-hot sauce that was taken to the table and poured over a pile of deep-fried crispy rice with a violent sizzling and a cloud of steam. Sniggering, my classmates told me this dish was known as "Bombing Tokyo". Although the current anti-Japanese protests in China are just the latest sign of the deep mistrust many Chinese feel for their former invaders, I've never seen this unpleasant name appear in cookery books, which instead usually say that the dish may be called "A sudden clap of thunder".Have you come across any other revolting names for delicious dishes, in any language?Photo Credit: 'Pock marked old woman's tofu' might give Brits pause for thought, but what do visitors to the UK think they'll get if they order toad in the hole? Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters