So I'm working on translating a short recipe that I found online. The title
calls it バタコチーズライス. I know that バタ is "butter", チーズ is "cheese", and ライス is
"rice", but I can't for the life of me figure out what コ is doing in here. Is
バタコ referring to something else I'm not catching? All the googling I can
muster didn't yield anything useful for "batako" or "bataco", so it doesn't
seem to be an ingredient on its own, and it doesn't seem to be acting as an
article or particle. Thoughts??
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2019-08-13T19:19:32.807
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2019-08-15T09:19:30.840
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translation katakana food
How would you translate this? バタコチーズライス
「コ」 is short for 「コーン」 ("corn") here.

This type of shortening is very common in Japanese when the word would get too
long without it..
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2019-08-13T21:02:46.010
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This dish would be "Butter Corn-Cheese Rice" in English, something similar to
Corn and Rice Casserole!
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2019-08-13T21:34:05.017
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2019-08-13T21:34:05.017
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As a fact-based answer, there is nothing much to say besides that コ here
stands for コーン (corn). However, I'm pretty sure that the exact word form
**バタコチーズライス** is chosen because it makes a reference to two major characters
in the famous children manga/anime series
[アンパンマン](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anpanman), namely **バタコ** (a female
baker) and **チーズ** (dog).

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bumn9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bumn9.png)  
(from the left: チーズ, バタコ, ジャムおじさん)
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2019-08-14T09:29:50.957
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2019-08-14T09:29:50.957
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If the dish is intended to be a play on the names of the famous cartoon
series, it could actually just be butter-cheese-rice. The name バタコ is for the
young female cook. バタ is no doubt a shortened form of バター which means butter.
But バタ is also probably a reference to バタバタする which is a phrase that is used
when someone is busy doing a lot of things in busy scattered way...to be
flustered which is how the character often acts in the cartoon. コ on the other
hand is probably a カタカナ rendering of 子 which is a common ending to female
names. So my guess is that it has taken the two charactersバタコさん and チーズ the
dog and combined them withライス to get butter cheese rice.
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2019-08-15T09:19:30.840
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2019-08-15T09:19:30.840
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answer