Answers to A Little Food Quiz

Here are the answers to “A little food quiz.” Give yourself a point for every correct answer, then come back to the word wenches page and tell us how you went.

1) Chocolate first arrived in which European country?
c) Spain
The Spanish Conquistador; Hernan Cortes introduced the drink to Spain upon returning from his Mexican expedition, during which he was given some by the Aztec King Montezuma II. It was originally only a drink, similar to today’s hot chocolate.

2) Which famous lady had an enormous effect on French Cuisine?
a) Catherine de Medici
Surprising isn’t it? I always associated her with poisons, but Catherine de Medicis arrived in France from Florence with a retinue of master chefs. She brought Italian staples: milk-fed veal, baby peas, artichokes, broccoli, and various pastas. The French court tasted, for the first time, such delicacies as quenelles (fish dumplings), zabaglione (a rich egg yolk and wine custard), and scaloppine. With her arrival, French cookery embarked on a course that produced the most complex and refined cuisine in the Western world.

3) Gin, which became a hugely popular drink in England, was invented in:
b) Holland
First made in 17th-century Holland, the manufacture and popularity of gin spread quickly throughout Europe, and variations of the Dutch formula began to appear. Gin is an alcoholic beverage made by distilling fermented mixtures of grains and flavouring the resulting alcohol with juniper berries. The name is derived from the French word genievre (juniper).

4) Which country initially denounced coffee as “Satan’s Brew”?
d) Italy

5) The famous insurance company Lloyd’s of London was named after:
a) A coffee house owned by Edward Lloyd
Lloyd’s Insurance took its name from the late-17th-century London coffee house of Edward Lloyd, where marine insurers met to do business.

6) In 1717, Thomas Twining
c) opened the first tea house for ladies in London

7) Giovanni Giacomo was a famous gastronome of his time. He is better known as:
d) Casanova
Another surprise to me. Apart from his fame as a seducer of ladies, he was a famous gastronome of his time, and sometimes went to great lengths and travels to taste certain foods.

8) The word “restaurant” did not appear in its current meaning until
a) 1765 in Paris
Public eating places have existed since ancient times, but the modern version of the restaurant (from the French restaurer, “to restore”) did not appear until the 18th century. The word was first applied in its current usage by A. Boulanger when he opened an eating establishment in Paris in 1765.

9) Marmalade was invented by
a) The Portuguese who made it out of quinces
Marmalade existed in Spain and Portugal since at least the 15th century. The name “marmalade” originates from the Portuguese word “marmelo” or quince
In the UK, Seville oranges, which are slightly bitter, were used medicinally and in a few recipes but were not really a fruit consumed fresh. In the 1760s a thrifty Scotswoman, Janet Keiller, created orange marmalade containing strips of peel after her son had purchased a shipment of bitter Seville oranges which would be unlikely to sell. Her family went on to produce it commercially. However she was not the first. A Scottish recipe for orange marmalade appears in “Mrs McLintoch’s Receipts” of 1736.

10) Alexis Benoit Soyer was
d) all of the above

He was a remarkable man. Read more about him here.

11) The process of canning food was:
b) developed in response to a competition offered by the French government
In an attempt to overcome the problem of food spoilage, a prize was offered by the French in 1795 for the invention of a method of keeping food safe for troops. Nicolas Appert, a chef in Paris, accepted this challenge and developed the canning process. The immensity of his undertaking becomes clearer when it is recognised that he had to fashion containers in which to package his product. Using bottles closed with cork and wire, he won the prize for his canning process in 1810. At about the same time, the tin-coated metal can was patented in England, giving rise to the term canning.
The standard can for processed food was first used in the early 1900s

12) In 1828 the Dutch invented
c) a process that created eating chocolate
Up until this point, all chocolate was drinking chocolate. The Dutch made chocolate powder by squeezing most of the fat from finely ground cacao beans. The cocoa butter from pressing was soon being added to a powder-sugar mixture, and a new product, eating chocolate, was born.

Give yourself a point for every question you got right. Then come back to the word wenches’ site and tell us how you went. Did you have fun with this? Learn anything new? Anything that surprised you?

Thanks to Wikipedia for the information I used to make up this quiz.

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Answers to A Little Food Quiz

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