Street Food of the World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which country's lahmacun is a wafer-thin round of dough spread with a paste of minced lamb, tomato, pepper and parsley and blasted in a very hot oven until the edges char, then squeezed with lemon, piled with salad and rocket, rolled up and eaten in the hand?

Question 2

Which country's bifana is a simple sandwich of thin pork steaks simmered in a garlicky white-wine and paprika marinade until tender, then piled into a soft papo-seco roll, eaten with mustard or piri-piri and washed down with a beer or a coffee, and once praised on camera by Anthony Bourdain?

Question 3

Which country's mamak stalls are famous for roti canai, a lump of enriched dough repeatedly stretched, oiled and slapped against the counter until tissue-thin, then folded, griddled and served flaky with a bowl of dal or curry sauce for dipping?

Question 4

Which country treats mohinga, a soup of rice vermicelli in a thick, lemongrass-scented broth thickened with toasted chickpea flour and made from catfish or other freshwater fish, as its national dish, eaten most often at breakfast from a vendor carrying the pot and stove on a shoulder pole?

Question 5

Which country's samsa is a flaky, often triangular pastry of minced lamb and onion, or pumpkin, baked by slapping it onto the inside wall of a clay tandoor oven so it puffs and browns, sold hot from bakeries and bazaar stalls across Central Asia?

Question 6

Which country's beloved warm-weather sweet, sold from carts with a glass case, pairs a mound of sticky rice steamed in coconut milk with thick slices of ripe yellow mango and a final pour of salty-sweet coconut cream and a scatter of toasted mung beans?

Question 7

Which country's pljeskavica is a large, flat, spiced patty of mixed minced meats grilled over charcoal and served in a soft flatbread called lepinja with raw onion, a soured-cream spread and a red pepper relish, often billed as the Balkan hamburger?

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About Street Food of the World

Street food is where a country cooks in public. It is cheaper, faster and more honest than restaurant food, invented by and for people who work with their hands, sold from a cart, a hatch, a boat or a brazier on the pavement, and eaten standing up. This quiz visits about eighty of these snacks, from the sizzling-plate pig's-head sisig of Pampanga to the fish sandwiches handed up from bobbing boats beside a bridge in Istanbul.

Every question works the same way. A street dish is described, by its ingredients, how it is cooked and sold, and the scene around the stall, and you pick the country it comes from out of four options. The explanation then gives where in that country it started, often a single city or even a single vendor, how it is really eaten, and the migration or the hard time that produced it.

The quiz leans Asian, and honestly so: the continent's cart-and-hawker culture, from the night markets of Taiwan and the pushcarts of Java to the pavement grills of Xinjiang and the breakfast noodle pots of Yangon, is the densest and most varied on Earth. But it also travels through the Levant and the Caucasus, central Europe's fried-dough belt, the sausage stands of the German-speaking world, the beach shacks of the Caribbean and West Africa's dusk-lit suya grills.

A pattern runs through almost all of it: street food is the food of movement and of making do. It carries the marks of the people who arrived hungry and cooked what they could. Chinese migrants left noodle soups from Cambodia to Peru. Indian workers barred from restaurants under segregation hollowed out a loaf for their curry in Durban. Post-war shortages gave Japan its cabbage pancakes, Poland its cheese-and-ketchup baguette, and Berlin its curry sausage from British army rations. Enslaved cooks given the offal cuts turned beef hearts into Peru's anticuchos.

Many of these snacks are shared or fought over, and the answers say so: satay, the papaya-salad, nasi lemak, roti canai, kaya toast, the Balkan grilled patties, the choripan and the meat pie all cross borders and start arguments. Where a photograph of the food would not simply hand the answer to someone who already knows it, it is shown with the question; the most globally recognised items are left as text so the picture is not a giveaway.

A street-food quiz sticks because each answer is something you could actually buy tonight, from a real person at a real cart, for the price of a coffee. Learn that a Xi'an pork sandwich may be two thousand years old, that Vietnamese bun cha was eaten by a US president on a plastic stool, and that Filipino vendors call balut through the streets after dark, and the map turns into a set of directions. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.