I also am coming late to this thread, so not much left to rhapsodize about. I do like the expression 'ricer' used most often, altho not exclusively, for potatoes. (I believe it can also be used for spaetzle.)
There are some words for food which I like to hear as much as I like to eat. In place of our clumpy English word 'eggplant', the French have 'aubergine' and the Italians 'melanzana'. The pasta which we call 'bowties' is 'farfalle' (butterflies) in Italian. That reminds me of one of my favorite Italian words (which has nothing to do with the subject at hand, but I have to mention it) 'pipistrella', the word for 'bat' (the kind that flies around). I have a theory that if we had as beautiful a word for the creature, it would not have such a bad rep. Come to think of it, you might get children to eat eggplant if you called it aubergine.
