Today in Foood on Fridays we look at all the ways you can visit Philadelphia in Europe.

But remember those sandwich menus I mentioned when I was talking about Gurken? There’s another item that’s often listed as a sandwich fillings that I want to talk about today: Philadelphia.  Although I don’t know if it’s caught on in the U.S., in both Italy and Germany, “Philadelphia” is used as a generic term to refer to cream cheese. It’s never called “Philadelphia cream cheese”, just Philadelphia.

Now, there is a proper German term for cream cheese, Frischkäse. But that’s not the word you’ll see on menus, and it’s not the common word people use for talking about cream cheese in German. No, day-to-day, people talk about Philadelphia.

I guess it’s become like the word kleenex or xerox in the U.S., where the brand-name has been adopted into the lexicon to refer to the generic thing. Xerox is a brand, but xerox nowadays in the U.S. is both a noun and a verb.

Brand-names becoming regular words is actually a fairly common phenomenon. Here’s a link to an article I found about it, but there are more examples I’m sure than are listed in that article.

What’s really striking is how many ways Philadelphia is used, at least in Germany and Italy. I remember seeing it listed on pizza menus in Italy, although I never tried it. Here in Germany, it’s always listed as an option on a wide variety of sandwiches.

Last month, a Japanese friend from my German language class invited me over to teach me how to make sushi rolls. Her favorite type is with smoked salmon and Philadelphia as the filling; yes, cream cheese in sushi. Who knew?

Now for me, although I certainly had cream cheese in different sandwiches on occasion in the U.S., I think of cream cheese as being a topping for a bagel.  A bagel and cream cheese – can’t get more traditional than that for what you do with cream cheese.  We don’t get bagels in Tübingen very often, though. There is one place that has some bagel sandwiches, but they aren’t just topped with cream cheese, they have Philadelphia combined with other things on top.

However, last March Chris and I were in Berlin, and near the hotel there was an actual bagel shop that sold bagels and cream cheese.  So, one morning I went in to order a bagel. I could see vats with various cream cheese spreads at the ready, but there were no labels to say what the different kinds were.  So I stepped up to the counter and ordered a sesame bagel — in German — with regular “Philadelphia”; after all, I’ve lived in Europe for a while, so I know what to call that stuff.

The clerk looked at me and said something like , OK, a sesame bagel with Frischkäse. Got it.

Apparently the one thing you don’t put Philadelphia on is a bagel. Who knew.