Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:
— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan
Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):
— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.
Her response:
— GY: Thank you for this correction. [AZ: she then changed carnivorous quiche to quiche for carnivores] I was struggling with how to express it. I think I will write a silly poem about carnivorous quiche.
That would be a fabulous idea
An alternative. I then thought to browse the net for quiches with meat in them. Quite an assortment. Under the names meat lovers / lover’s/ lovers’ quiche, or simply meat quiche (an N + N Ingredient compound (like pinepple pizza)) — referring to a quiche with one, some, or all of: bacon, ham (of various sorts), or sausage (of various sorts).
So maybe a better edit of carnivorous quiche would have been just meat quiche.
(Note: there’s still an asymmetry between the vege- (plant) sphere and carni- (meat) sphere: meat quiche is immediately understandable, even if you’ve never heard it before; but plant / vegetable quiche is decidedly odd; instead we get vegetarian quiche.)
The title of this posting. Quiche, Henri, les flics! ‘Quiche, Henry, the cops!’ A very silly bilingual play on English Quick, Henry, the Flit! — an old advertising slogan for the insect spray Flit. See my 4/4/17 posting “Quick, Bruce, the blat!”, with a section on the slogan.
October 22, 2025 at 6:24 am |
I expect that the quiche that people are most familiar with is the Lorraine, decidedly meat-bearing. I also note that the local supermarkets used to sell something labeled “Quiche Florentine”, but decided that this was insufficiently intelligible to American shoppers, and relabeled it as “Spinach quiche”. For some time after this change happened, my husband would lament that one could no longer find the Florentine, and I couldn’t tell for sure whether he was joking.