Morning everyone!
Translating a Spanish restaurant menu into English, I found myself doubting whether to capitalize sauce names. Some examples are romesco and Sriracha.
Not being familiar with them, I looked them up and found out that romesco sauce comes from the Catalonian Spanish region, while Sriracha comes from the same-name Thai town where it was created.
In these searches I found Sriracha always being capitalized, and romesco not necessarily.
Would anyone have an input on the topic?
Thanks and regards!
Lau
Best Answer
There is no more reason to capitalize romesco sauce than there is to capitalize tartar sauce, soy sauce, tomato sauce, cream sauce, picante sauce, diavolo sauce, puttanesca sauce, or rémoulade sauce. It doesn’t work like Caesar salad, French dressing, Dijon mustard, German potato salad, or Italian parsley.
That’s because you only capitalize that first word when it’s already a proper noun or else an adjective derived from a proper noun. Counterexamples in the realm of sauces include Worcestershire sauce, Hollandaise sauce, or Bolognese sauce.
That’s because romesco doesn’t originate as some foreign-looking synonym of Roman. To begin with, it’s either Spanish (and so pronounced /roˈmesko/) or Catalan (and so pronounced /ruˈmɛsku/) in immediate origin, and of course Latin more distantly. The OED defines the word as:
Its etymology is given as:
None of its citations capitalize the word. Here are the two most recent ones:
Lastly, if you ever use a Romance-style term like:
Then you are trying to use the original non-English term in English so you should be careful to preserve the original capitalization, which occurs only for proper nouns; there is no concept of proper adjectives there.