Toast Egg Hole Food Naming

[eredien]

Here is a little instructional recipe comic about how to Make the food with Eggs in a Hole in Toast, which I don't even eat.

Why was I so interested in this dish? Well, here is a spreadsheet on what to call it. There are at least 62 different names that I found. Is there any other food with this many accepted variations on the name? I wonder why there are so many. Maybe it is a regional linguistic difference, like the coke/pepsi thing.

I had originally hoped to make a Venn Diagram of the entire thing, before I realized that:
a.) Open Office cannot generate Venn Diagrams
b.) This spreadsheet would make an interesting problem in the current mathematical limits of Venn diagramming.

If you are a computer scientist or a linguist and would like to analyze this data, please do so. Or, if you are an artist who wants to give it a go. I think that it would make an interesting problem in the limits of Venn diagramming.

Names that statistically should occur but don't exist include:
One-Eyed Hobo
One-Eyed Pirate (I cannot believe this combination does not exist)
Pirate's Eggs
Sun & Moon (Pretty obvious, with the round things...)
Sunny Toasts
Sun's Eye
Sun in the Hole
Sun in a Window (or this one)
Toad in a Blanket
Baby in a Basket
Baby in a Nest
Baby in a Blanket (or this one...why is the Baby in a Hole, for God's sake, instead of a basket or nest or blanket?)
Toasty Eggs (The reversal is obvious)
Hen's Eye
Chick's Eyes (Maybe these are too gross for some people, but why is a Camel's Eye a lot better?)
Gaslight Windows (Steampunk Brunches Everywhere may adopt this term).
Chicks in a Hole
Chicks in the Egg (Seriously?)
Hen on a Nest (Seriously, seriously?)

Comments

[badoingdoing.livejournal.com]

Whatever you call it, it's what I had for breakfast this morning.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of two or three of these. Usually call them "Eggs in a hole" myself. But, I was pretty sure Adam and Eve on a Raft was dinerspeak, referring to two fried eggs ON a piece of toast, not in a piece of fried bread. (If we call a piece of toasted bread, "toast," should we call a piece of fried bread "fry?")

[eredien]

But Fry Bread is a totally different thing. Aah, food.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Well there's Fry Bread, which is raw before frying, and then there's Fried bread, which is cooked before frying.

I don't think Food is the problem. I think it's the English language.

[thespooniest.livejournal.com]

Gashouse Eggs were the name my family always used. I haven't had this in a while, actually. I loved them as a kid, though, and I don't even like eggs normally.

I should see about making a batch sometime.

[eredien]

I never, ever heard that name until yesterday. Maybe it's a regionalism? I don't really even know what a gashouse is. Is it like a filling station?

[skygiants]

See, I thought they were Toad-in-the-hole, and then I realized that something else Toad-in-the-hole (the thing with batter and Yorkshire pudding) and thought I'd been wrong all along, and then realized it was not an either thing but an also thing and ended up thoroughly confused. Now I just call them egg-in-a-basket. (But growing up as far as I can remember it was just 'that egg and bread thing Dad makes.')

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I thought that something else (the sausage thing) was Toad in the Hole, also. It took me awhile to get Toad in the Hole, and Bubbles and Squeak, neither of which I have ever tasted or even seen in real life, straightened out.

[skygiants]

Me too! For a while I also got them both confused with Spotted Dick, until I realized that, puns aside, Spotted Dick had nothing to do with sausages.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Huh, the Bubble and Squeak recipes I've seen did not include sausages, just mashed up fried veggies. I did a lot better with all these dishes after a friend brought me back a cookbook from England!

[eredien]

The only Bubble & Squeak recipe I have ever used involved bacon; the first time I ever saw it cooked it was in a colonial historical reenactment village. I thought it was the best thing ever--cabbbage, bacon, raisins. I was a weird little kid.

[haplessweasel.livejournal.com]

We always called them bird nests and then my mom would make us blanket nests to sit in while we ate them. It was awesome.

[khava.livejournal.com]

I have always called this "Rocky Mountain Eggs," which is not listed but is close to the listed name "Rocky Mountain Toast." My mother claims we called it this because her brother always used to make them when he was camping in the Rocky Mountains, but I've long suspected that the name was more widespread than that.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

We call it Rocky Mountain Toast, but I've never met anyone else who does. I always assumed it was my dads fault (it was a father-and-son dish from my brother's childhood.)

[eredien]

Oooh no, another variation!

[khava.livejournal.com]

Also, this sounds like the kind of problem / subject-matter than XKCD would tackle.

[thoughtsdriftby.livejournal.com]

Thinking the structure of the dish and it's naming was in trying to get some food into a young fussy eater. I was one of those myself, but still cooking them from time to time.

The memories seem to last much longer than any packaged fare, even if the package did have a prize inside.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

I've always called them Rocky Mountain Toast. Hens in a Nest is a different dish involving eggs in biscuits made in a muffin pan, and I almost never make it because it requires medium eggs. (If you use the normal big ones, they overflow the little muffin cups.)

[eredien]

The eggs are in the middle of the biscuits, like a kind of breakfast jelly donut? That sounds really cool. How do you make it? I am thinking that would be delicious to try with biscuits and vegan cheese, not to mention freezable.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Not quite -- you kind of bend the raw biscuits (the recipe uses refrigerator biscuits, but any kind that's actually a dough rather than a batter would work) into little nests and put them in the muffin papers, then break an egg in the middle and bake. The original recipe has grated cheese and wheat germ on top, but it's pretty customizable. It also almost always results in the biscuits laminating themselves to the muffin papers so that you end up having to eat the paper, which I thought was *delicious* when I was seven ;-)