A tricky little addition

Hello, If I have a variety of submit buttons all called 'add' but with different vaues, (food types fish, pork, beef ) I want to feed this into a function to increment the corresponfding cookies value by 1. This is what I have so far if (isset($add)){ $variable= "$".$add; echo "the variable is".$variable; $variable = intval($_COOKIE['cookie']['$add']); echo $variable; $variable++; setcookie("cookie[$add]", "$fish fish"); echo var_dump($_COOKIE['cookie']['fish']); } So if add = "fish", I need to make a variable $fish and then retrieve the current value of fish from the cookie using the var_dump function. $variable= "$".$add; echo "the variable is".$variable; $variable = intval($_COOKIE['cookie']['$add']); The problem is in these three lines. I need to make an on-the-fly vairable based on the button that has been pressed. I hope this makes sense, Any other suggestions would be appreciated R.