Spices, Herbs & Seasonings Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which West African spice, small reddish-brown seeds with a warm, peppery, faintly citrus and cardamom flavour, was shipped across the Sahara and widely used in medieval and Renaissance Europe as a cheaper stand-in for black pepper, giving one stretch of coast its old trading name?

Question 2

Which ingredient is the glossy, hourglass-shaped double leaf of a knobbly citrus tree, torn or finely shredded to release an intense lime-blossom aroma into Thai, Cambodian, Lao and Indonesian curries and soups?

Question 3

Which spice, the world's most expensive by weight, is the dried red stigmas of a purple autumn crocus, picked by hand at dawn, with something like 150 to 200 flowers needed to yield a single gram?

Question 4

Which Japanese table blend, whose name means 'seven-flavour chilli pepper', combines ground red chilli with sansho pepper, roasted orange peel, black and white sesame, ground ginger, nori seaweed and hemp or poppy seed, and is shaken over noodle soups and grilled meat?

Question 5

Which herb, sold as a curly type used mostly as a garnish and a flat-leaved 'Italian' type with more flavour, is the main ingredient, not a garnish, of the Levantine salad tabbouleh, and is chopped with garlic and lemon zest to make the Italian topping gremolata?

Question 6

Which Australian native tree has leaves so rich in the aroma compound citral, up to 90 percent of their oil, that they are considered the most intensely lemon-scented foliage of any plant, and are dried and ground as a native bush seasoning for fish, chicken, shortbread and tea?

Question 7

Which spice comes in yellow, brown and black forms from a few related plants in the cabbage family, and releases its pungency only when the ground seed is mixed with cold liquid, a reaction that heat and vinegar then tame?

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About Spices, Herbs & Seasonings

A spice is a dried piece of a plant, a seed, bark, root, bud or berry, used in small amounts for flavour, colour or preservation. A herb is usually the fresh green leaf. A seasoning blend is a mix of the two, plus salt, built for a particular kitchen. This quiz covers about eighty of them, from saffron picked flower by flower to a black salt that smells of boiled eggs.

Every question describes one, by the part of the plant it is, where it grows, the aroma compound behind its flavour, the dishes it defines, and the trade or history attached to it, and asks you to name it from four choices. The explanation then fills in the botany, how it is prepared and used, and the story: the war fought over nutmeg, the enslaved boy who solved vanilla pollination, the spice Rome prized above black pepper and then forgot.

A few threads run through it. The spice trade drove exploration, colonisation and some of history's ugliest monopolies: the Dutch massacre of the Banda islanders for nutmeg, the destruction of clove trees to keep a corner on the market, the swap of an island for Manhattan, the Grain Coast named for a pepper substitute, a Roman herb harvested to extinction. Flavour chemistry keeps surprising: the maple smell of fenugreek, the tongue-numbing tingle of Sichuan pepper, the soap that some people taste in coriander leaf, the boiled-egg sulphur of a rock salt, the single molecule that stands in for real vanilla in almost everything.

It also travels the whole spice rack rather than staying in the familiar Mediterranean corner. The souring agents of Asia, tamarind and kokum and amchoor and black dried lime. The pungent herbs the West rarely sees, epazote and hoja santa, shiso and Vietnamese coriander, curry leaf and pandan. The resins, asafoetida and mastic and the cherry-stone spice mahleb. And the blends that are really recipes in themselves, from garam masala and panch phoron to ras el hanout, berbere, za'atar, shichimi togarashi and Chesapeake Old Bay.

The quiz also clears up the confusions people carry around: that cassia is sold as cinnamon, that most wasabi is dyed horseradish, that curry powder is a British invention, that star anise is unrelated to aniseed, that the 'seeds' of caraway and cumin belong to different worlds. Where a photograph of the whole spice or herb would not simply hand the answer to someone who already knows it, it is shown; the instantly recognisable ones are left as text.

The reward is practical. Learn what galangal does that ginger cannot, why marjoram goes in at the end and thyme at the start, what makes a garam masala different from a curry powder, and the spice rack stops being a row of dusty jars and becomes a set of tools. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.