Late morning, and I am sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook open, a pencil in my hand, the last of the March light falling across a plate I have just set down. On the plate: a few spears of white asparagus, a soft-boiled egg whose yolk has barely begun to spill, a scatter of chervil. I made it without thinking much, the way one does when the market gives you something so fresh it seems to ask for almost nothing. But now I want to write it down—not as a recipe, exactly, but as a memory. And so I face the small, strange question that every home cook eventually faces: what do I call this?

In the world of food writing, of blogs and social media and algorithmically sorted recipe collections, this question has become a kind of performance. A dish needs a name that promises, that persuades, that catches the eye before the hand can scroll past. We have learned to name our food like we are selling it, even when the only person we are feeding is ourselves. But I was not raised in that world. I was raised in a kitchen where dishes were named the way one names a familiar path through the woods—not to attract anyone, but to remember the way back.

My grandmother never called a dish Tarte aux Pommes Façon Grand-Mère for effect. It simply was that, because it was made in her way, in her kitchen, with apples from the tree outside the back door. The name was not a brand. It was a description, quiet and exact. And I think often now about the difference between those two ways of naming—the difference between saying what a dish is and saying what it promises. It is a difference that runs deep through French home cooking, and it has something to teach us about how we might name our own food, if we are willing to unlearn the habit of persuasion.

Let us begin with the names themselves, the ones that have been passed down not through cookbooks but through hands. Pot-au-feu. The name means nothing more than “pot on the fire.” It does not tell you that the broth will be clear and golden, that the meat will fall apart at the touch of a fork, that the marrow will slide from the bone like a promise kept. It only tells you the method, the object, the simple fact of its making. And yet, for anyone who has grown up with the smell of it simmering through a Sunday afternoon, the name carries all of that and more. The name is a door, not a billboard.

Gratin Dauphinois. The name tells you it is a gratin, from the Dauphiné region. It does not tell you that the potatoes will be sliced thin as a coin, that the cream will have reduced to something almost nutty, that the top will be browned in patches like a field after harvest. It does not need to. The name locates the dish in a place, and the place carries the memory. Soupe au Pistou—soup with pistou, the Provençal paste of basil and garlic and oil. The name does not list the vegetables, does not promise “rustic” or “hearty” or any of the words we have learned to use as bait. It simply names the thing that makes it what it is. Clafoutis aux Cerises du Jardin—clafoutis with cherries from the garden. The name is a small story: a dessert, a fruit, a place. It does not need to say “easy” or “authentic” or “the best you will ever taste.” It trusts the cherries to speak for themselves.

This way of naming is not unique to French cooking, of course. Every culinary tradition has its descriptive names, its dishes named after cities or saints or the shape of the pot. But there is something in the French home kitchen that resists the pull toward exaggeration, toward the language of menus and marketing. Perhaps it is because French cooking has so long been mythologized as the pinnacle of technique that the home cook has had to carve out a quieter space, a space where food does not need to impress. Or perhaps it is simply that the French market calendar, with its relentless, gentle rhythm, keeps the cook’s attention on the ingredient rather than the presentation. When you have just bought the first asparagus of the year, still damp from the field, you do not need to call the dish anything more than Asperges Blanches, Sauce Mousseline. The name is a record of a moment, not a claim on anyone’s attention.

I have been thinking about this because I have noticed, in my own notebooks, a creeping anxiety about names. When I make something new—a dish I have improvised from the end of the week’s vegetables, a soup that came together without a plan—I find myself pausing over what to write at the top of the page. The old names come easily: Soupe à l’Oignon, Omelette aux Fines Herbes, Poulet Rôti. But the new ones, the ones that are mine, seem to demand something more. A title, perhaps. Something that sounds like it belongs in a collection, something that would look right on a card at a dinner party. And I have to stop myself, because that impulse is not French. It is not home cooking. It is the voice of a world that wants everything to be a product.

The pressure to find the perfect, catchy title—whether for a dinner party menu or a personal recipe collection—is a modern anxiety that French home cooking quietly resists. In the French kitchen, a dish is named for what it is, not for what it might become in the eyes of others. This is not a rule, but a habit, inherited like the gesture for peeling a turnip or the way one tests a sauce for salt. And it is a habit that can be learned, or relearned, if we pay attention to the names we already use without thinking. When you say “roast chicken,” you are not selling anything. You are stating a fact. When you say “green beans with garlic,” you are describing a dish, not promising an experience. The marketing language creeps in only when we start to believe that our cooking needs to justify itself.

There is a resource I came across recently, from the Purdue Online Writing Lab, that speaks to this from a different angle. In their introduction to creative writing, they discuss the importance of voice and the resistance to formulaic conventions—the idea that authentic writing comes from attention to the subject rather than to the audience’s expectations. It is the same principle, applied to words on a page rather than food on a plate. The pressure to name something cleverly is, at its root, a pressure to perform. And performance is the enemy of presence. When we cook, we are present with the ingredients, the heat, the smell, the memory. When we name what we have cooked, we can choose to stay in that presence, or we can step outside it and try to imagine how the name will look to someone else.

Of course, there are times when we do need to name something new. A dish we have improvised, a meal we want to remember, a recipe we are writing down for a friend. In those moments, the French approach offers a quiet method: name it after the moment, the ingredient, the person, or the place, rather than the promise. If you have made a soup from the last of the winter vegetables, call it Soupe de Fin d’Hiver—end-of-winter soup. If you have roasted a chicken with tarragon and cream, call it Poulet à l’Estragon—chicken with tarragon. If you have made a cake for a friend’s birthday, call it Gâteau d’Anniversaire pour Hélène—birthday cake for Hélène. The name becomes a small act of attention, a way of saying: this is what it was, this is when it happened, this is who it was for.

I have found, in my own practice, that this way of naming changes the way I cook. When I know that the dish will be called simply what it is, I am less tempted to add something unnecessary, to garnish for effect, to make it more than it needs to be. The name holds me to the truth of the ingredients. A Tarte aux Pommes is just an apple tart. It does not need caramel drizzle or a lattice crust or a dusting of powdered sugar to earn its place on the table. It needs good apples, good butter, a dough made with patience. The name is a discipline.

And yet, there is also room for poetry. The French kitchen is not allergic to beauty in naming; it simply does not confuse beauty with persuasion. A dish called Soleil de Mars sur une Assiette—March sun on a plate—is not trying to sell you anything. It is trying to capture a moment, a quality of light, a fleeting season. It is a name written in a private notebook, not on a menu. It is the kind of name that arises when you are cooking for yourself, or for someone you love, and you want to remember not just the ingredients but the feeling of the day. This is the other side of the French naming tradition: the poetic name that is not for the public, but for the self. It is a way of keeping time.

I think of the names my grandmother wrote in her own notebook, the one I found after she died. Potage du Jour de Pluie—rainy-day soup. Gratin de la Dernière Courge—gratin of the last squash. Oeufs au Plat pour un Soir Triste—fried eggs for a sad evening. These names were not for anyone else. They were for her, a way of marking the days through the food she made. And they taught me, without ever saying it directly, that a recipe is not just a set of instructions. It is a record of a life. The name is the first line of that record.

In the modern world of recipe sharing, we have largely lost this private, poetic naming. We name our dishes for search engines, for social media, for the anonymous reader who is looking for “easy weeknight dinners” or “impressive desserts for guests.” There is nothing wrong with this, exactly—it is a form of generosity, to make one’s cooking findable. But it is also a form of forgetting. When every dish is named for its utility, we lose the thread that connects the food to the day, the person, the particular light in the kitchen. We lose the names that are not useful, but true.

I have sometimes recommended a small tool to friends who are trying to unlearn the habit of over-naming. It is a book title generator, the sort that writers use when they are stuck on a title for a manuscript. The one I point them to is the book title ideas that fit the project that feel more like a French recipe name than a marketing headline. It is not a tool for finding the perfect name, but for loosening the grip of the persuasive instinct—for reminding oneself that a name can be a description, a fragment, a small poem, rather than a promise. I have used it myself, not to name a dish, but to play with the possibilities of language, to see what happens when I let go of the need to be clever. The results are often strange, sometimes beautiful, and almost never useful in the way we have been taught to value usefulness. But they are names, in the old sense: words that point to something, rather than words that sell something.

This is not to say that we should all abandon the practical names that help others find our recipes. If you are writing a blog or sharing a dish online, you may well need to call it “Simple French Apple Tart” rather than Tarte aux Pommes du Jardin. But I would suggest that we keep both names, the public one and the private one. The public name is a gift to the reader, a way of saying “this is what you will find here.” The private name is a gift to yourself, a way of saying “this is what it meant to me.” And the private name, I think, is the one that will last. It is the one that will bring back the day, the market, the person across the table, long after the public name has been replaced by the next trending search term.

There is a deeper lesson here, one that goes beyond naming. It is the lesson that French home cooking teaches over and over, in its rhythms and its repetitions: that the value of a dish is not in its novelty or its impressiveness, but in its relationship to the life around it. A Pot-au-feu is not valuable because it is a classic. It is valuable because it is a pot on the fire, simmering through a Sunday, filling the house with a smell that means rest. A Clafoutis aux Cerises is not valuable because it is a French dessert. It is valuable because it is cherries, and summer, and the pits left in for their faint almond bitterness, and the memory of picking cherries from a tree. The name is just the handle on that memory, the word that lets you pick it up and carry it with you.

So this morning, at my kitchen table, I wrote in my notebook: Soleil de Mars sur une Assiette. Not because it is clever, but because it is true to the light on the plate. The white asparagus, the egg, the chervil—they were not a recipe. They were a moment. And the name is my way of keeping that moment, of giving it a small, quiet shape that I can return to. When I look at it next year, in another March, I will remember not just what I made, but what the light was like, and how the kitchen smelled, and the sound of the market that morning. The name is not a title. It is a door.

I think we could all use more doors like that, in our kitchens and in our notebooks. Names that open onto memory rather than onto expectation. Names that describe rather than persuade. Names that are small and exact and true to the day they were written. The next time you make something you want to remember, try giving it a name that no one else will ever need to understand. Call it Soup for the First Cold Night, or Salad from the Overgrown Garden, or Cake for When You Missed Your Train. Call it what it is, and what it was for. And then write it down, and let it be enough.

The French kitchen has always known this. It has always named its dishes the way one names a familiar path: not to attract anyone, but to remember the way back. And in a world that is constantly asking us to perform our cooking, to brand our meals, to optimize our titles for the algorithm, this quiet habit of descriptive naming is a small resistance. It is a way of saying: this food is not a product. It is a part of my life. And its name is just a word for that.