How to Learn International Culinary Terms: French, Italian and Japanese Kitchen Vocabulary

Reading a menu in Lyon, Bologna or Kyoto without a translator is a skill you can build in a couple of weeks. The Flip It deck Culinary Terms: International (deck code TK7753) packs 193 cards across three culinary vocabularies: French kitchen technique, Italian dishes and pasta shapes, and the core words of Japanese cuisine. Each card gives the term on the front and a one-line definition on the back, so you learn what the word means in a kitchen, not just how to pronounce it.

Three cuisines, one deck

The 193 cards are not evenly split, and that matters for how you study them:

• French technique (about 70 cards) — knife cuts (julienne, brunoise, chiffonade, émincé, macédoine), the mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise) and their offspring (demi-glace, beurre blanc, gastrique, coulis), thickeners (roux, liaison, beurre manié, panade), and methods (sauté, sear, blanch, braise, deglaze, flambé, confit, sous vide, en papillote, en croûte, bain-marie, monter au beurre). Plus the vocabulary of stock: mirepoix, bouquet garni, sachet d'épices, consommé, court-bouillon, remouillage.
• Italian dishes and products (about 75 cards) — pasta (gnocchi, tortellini, agnolotti, strozzapreti, pizzoccheri, corzetti, passatelli), cured meats (prosciutto, bresaola, mortadella, pancetta, lardo, cotechino), regional classics (osso buco, saltimbocca, ribollita, caponata, bagna cauda, coda alla vaccinara, carciofi alla giudia) and desserts (tiramisu, panna cotta, zabaglione, semifreddo, sbrisolona, panforte, affogato).
• Japanese cuisine (about 50 cards) — washoku, dashi, katsuobushi, mirin, umeboshi, the cooking categories yakimono / nimono / agemono, noodle types (soba, udon, sōmen), rice bowls (donburi, gyūdon, oyakodon), sweets (wagashi, dorayaki, taiyaki, kakigōri) and the meal structure ichijū-sansai.

Ten cards from the deck

Two tips that fit this vocabulary

Group the French cards by what they do to food, not alphabetically. Cuts, sauces, thickeners, methods. When roux, liaison, beurre manié and panade sit next to each other in your head as "four ways to thicken", the definitions stop blurring together. The same trick works for the four Japanese cooking categories: yaki = grilled, ni = simmered, age = fried, and suddenly yakitori, yakiniku, nikujaga and agemono decode themselves.

For Italian dishes, attach the region. The deck already hints at it: ribollita is Tuscan, brodetto is Adriatic, coda alla vaccinara and carciofi alla romana are Roman, cotoletta alla milanese is Milanese, pizzoccheri comes from Valtellina. Picturing a map beats memorizing a list of ingredients.

A realistic pace

Do the French block first (it is the most transferable — half of professional kitchen English is French), then Italian, then Japanese. At 20 new cards a day with Flip It's spaced repetition handling the reviews, the whole deck takes about ten days, and the cards you already know (sushi, ramen, pesto, al dente) will get spaced out quickly so you spend your time on paupiette, quenelle and en vessie instead.

Open Flip It, search the library for deck code TK7753 — Culinary Terms: International — and start with mise en place. Fittingly.