Top 10 Food Words We Love

A. Scattergood

Cook Books in Pasadena

1. Strozzapreti: Bulky, twisty, hand-rolled pasta from central Italy whose name translates as "priest strangler.'' Allegedly a useful noodle in the arsenal of abused altar boys.

2. Pet de nonne: A kind of doughnut hole eaten by Alsatians in the week before Lent. Translation: "nun's fart.'' I'm sensing a theme developing here.

3. Egg cream: Which contains neither eggs nor cream, but can be really tasty if you freeze the milk until it starts to slush up and remember to squirt the Fox's U-Bet into the drink after, not before you have poured in the seltzer. If you do it right, the head looks a lot like meringue.

4. Phở: Not only does the more or less proper pronunciation of the Vietnamese noodle soup lend itself to all manner of odd restaurant-name puns - Phở King, Phở Real, Phở Kim II - but you get to sneer at the 90 percent of the population who always get it wrong. Was my first Weekly column on the dish, the one you still see blown up to the size of a billboard on the wall of a Chinatown noodle shop, titled "Friend or Phở?'' Bite me.

Anne Fishbein

bowl of phở

5. Sizzle: I just like that one. Sizzle. Sizzle.

6. Ovine: It means sheeplike. Food writers don't use that one nearly enough.