Food and Drink is part of Trivial Plus and one of its most played topics. It covers cooking technique, ingredients, wine and cocktails, with hard mode going deep into the chemistry and the classic French kitchen.
The first half of this sample is medium difficulty; the last few are taken from hard rounds.
What French kitchen term means "everything in its place"?
Type the answer
Mise en place
It means preparing and arranging every ingredient and tool before cooking starts. In professional kitchens it is treated as a discipline, not a tip.
Which spice comes from the dried stigmas of a crocus flower?
Saffron
Each flower has only three stigmas, and they are picked by hand, so a single pound of saffron takes tens of thousands of flowers. That is why it is the most expensive spice by weight.
Which pasta takes its name from the Italian for "little worms"?
Vermicelli
The other names are just as literal: farfalle are butterflies, orzo is barley (for its grain-like shape), and linguine are little tongues.
What does the Scoville scale measure?
Spiciness (pungency)
The pharmacist Wilbur Scoville devised it in 1912. It originally measured how far a pepper extract had to be diluted before tasters stopped feeling the heat of its capsaicin.
Which country is widely considered the birthplace of coffee?
Ethiopia
Coffee plants grow wild in the Ethiopian highlands, home of the legend of the goatherd Kaldi. Yemen is the strong distractor: it is where coffee was first cultivated and brewed as a drink, by Sufi monasteries in the 1400s.
In Australia, the Syrah grape is usually called what?
Shiraz
It is the same grape, from the Rhône Valley in France. The Australian name stuck so well that some producers elsewhere now use "Shiraz" for a riper, bolder style.
What gives Earl Grey tea its citrus flavour?
Oil of bergamot
Bergamot is a fragrant citrus grown mainly in Calabria, in the toe of Italy. The tea is named after the 2nd Earl Grey, British prime minister in the 1830s.
Which cocktail was created at the Raffles Hotel around 1915 by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon?
The Singapore Sling
The usual story is that it was a socially acceptable way for women to drink in public: it looked like fruit juice. The Mai Tai and the Zombie are American tiki drinks from the 1930s and 1940s.
Which grape must make up at least 80% of a Chianti Classico?
Sangiovese
Sangiovese is Tuscany's main red grape. Nebbiolo is Piedmont's (Barolo and Barbaresco), and Corvina is the base of Amarone in the Veneto.
Which French mother sauce is a white stock thickened with a pale roux?
Velouté
Béchamel uses milk instead of stock, espagnole uses brown stock and a dark roux, and hollandaise is an emulsion of butter and egg yolk with no roux at all.
Which mould makes the blue veins in Roquefort?
Penicillium roqueforti
Cheesemakers pierce the cheese so air can reach the mould inside. P. camemberti makes the white rind on Camembert and Brie; A. oryzae is the koji mould behind soy sauce and sake; S. cerevisiae is brewer's yeast.
Mace is made from which part of the nutmeg plant?
The aril around the seed
Mace is the lacy red covering wrapped around the nutmeg seed. Nutmeg is the seed itself, so one fruit gives two spices. A dried flower bud would be a clove.
Many food answers hide in the name. Vermicelli, mise en place and velouté all describe themselves if you know a little French or Italian.
Origin questions are a trap for confident players. The place a food is famous is not always the place it was invented.
In a room, every correct answer is worth 500 points plus a speed bonus of up to 500 more, so knowing it fast matters as much as knowing it. The full rules are on How to Play.
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