When creating a Fantasy world, how can you figure out where to use recognizable words and where to make up new ones?
I'm creating a whole new world and I realized that a lot of foods are named after Real Life places. It ended up opening a whole can of worms of trying to think of what words for itens and foods to keep and what ones to replace.
Tex: How far removed is your fantasy world to the one the reader comes from? Who are your readers? Are they from a single demographic (i.e. American, middle class, etc), or are they from varying demographics (Anglophones from across the planet, people of different religions, etc)? What does recognizable look like in your context?
If you’d like to mimic the look of Real Life Places, try introducing the place first, give it a few snippets of personality over a chapter or two, and then introduce the food. For example:
Chapter 1: Protagonist is in Red Door Village. There are very few red doors in this village, however protagonist is busy with Other Plot Things.
Chapter 2: Villager from Red Door Village answers question on the village’s name. “Well you see, ol' Granny Sewer's father couldn't see blue, and this was our only other paint." Mystery solved!
Chapter 3: Protagonist is in a town reasonably far from Red Door Village. They venture into an inn that has a red door, and the server recommends them their traditional dish. It turns out to be smoked herring ice cream. Protagonist learns that Ol’ Granny Sewer’s fifth cousin on her mother’s side who married into Fisherman Smoke’s family used to top all their food with smoked herrings, and did the same thing when ice cream came into town - it’s kind of grown on everyone, and most villagers will grudgingly admit it doesn’t taste that bad.
Voila, a food named after a place! In most instances, this is approximately the same amount of exposure to a food and its namesake place that is experienced in real life. How many people who have eaten New York-style pizza have been to New York? Proportionally, not many, though they’ve probably heard of the place in some aspect (most superficially, “this pizza is popular in New York”). It’s the same concept, you just need to put in a little more legwork on introducing to the audience a place in your world first, and then the food it’s named after.
Utuabzu: Another option is to take advantage of something called collocative substitution, where you can replace a part of a familiar phrase and readers will still be able to infer what it is. You often find this with insults like 'you absolute walnut', where it's clear that walnut is standing in for something significantly more unkind. So if you refer to 'Longish tea', people will infer it to be a kind of tea, perhaps equivalent to Chinese tea.
Otherwise you can also just replace the geographic adjective with a simpler descriptive one - bubbling wine instead of Champagne, spiced tea instead of masala chai, fruit-filled pastries instead of Danishes.
Feral: Unless you plan on creating a conlang and writing your story entirely in that conlang, maybe it’s best not to worry too much about it. “Uncleftish Beholding” by Poul Anderson is a famous sci-fi short story about atomic theory (that’s what the name means by the way) without using any loanwords whatsoever into English outside its German origins. It was an attempt to show just how stupid linguistic purism is, but I think this tumblr post does a pretty good job of explaining how to extend it to fantasy worlds.
