World Cuisines Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which country's dish laverbread is not bread at all but a dark puree of boiled seaweed, traditionally rolled in oatmeal and fried with bacon and cockles as a coastal breakfast?

Question 2

Which country's breakfast favourite, the hopper, is a small bowl-shaped pancake of fermented rice-flour and coconut batter, crisp and lacy at the rim and soft in the middle, often served with an egg cooked in the well of the batter and a fierce onion sambol on the side?

Question 3

Which country's celebration stew, fesenjan, simmers poultry or meatballs for hours in a dark, tart-sweet sauce of ground toasted walnuts and pomegranate, until the oil rises and the sauce turns almost black, and serves it over saffron rice?

Question 4

Which country's northern city of Aleppo is the origin of muhammara, a rough red dip pounded from roasted red peppers, walnuts, breadcrumbs, pomegranate molasses and a smoky-hot pepper paste, scooped up with flatbread?

Question 5

Which country's state of Texas is the birthplace of chili con carne, a thick stew of beef and dried chillies with cumin and oregano but, in its strict competition form, no beans and no tomato, sold from the 1880s by women vendors in San Antonio's main plaza?

Question 6

Which country's southern region of Andalusia is the home of gazpacho, a cold raw soup of blended tomato, cucumber, pepper, garlic, bread, olive oil and sherry vinegar, drunk or spooned on scorching days, though older versions had no tomato at all?

Question 7

Which country's notorious traditional delicacy, hakarl, is Greenland shark buried and pressed for weeks, then hung to air-dry for months, turning the otherwise poisonous flesh safe to eat but leaving it with a powerful smell of ammonia?

Question 8

Which country's everyday meal, eaten twice a day by much of the population, is dal bhat, a plate of steamed rice with a pour-over lentil soup, a small vegetable curry, a pickle and often a scoop of fermented greens, with free refills the norm at eateries?

Question 9

Which country's banh mi sandwich splits a light, thin-crusted baguette and fills it with pate, cold cuts or grilled meat, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, coriander, chilli and a smear of mayonnaise, a direct edible legacy of French colonial rule?

Question 10

Which country, along with its small southern neighbour, is a core home of laksa, a spicy noodle soup with many regional forms, the best known thickened with coconut milk and a shrimp-and-chilli paste, another soured sharply with tamarind and topped with flaked fish and pineapple?

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About World Cuisines

A national dish is a small act of storytelling. It says something about a country's land and climate, its history of trade and conquest and migration, its religion and its idea of hospitality. This quiz travels through about eighty of them, from the rice pans of Valencia and the herdsmen's cauldrons of the Hungarian plains to the earth ovens of the Pacific and the salt-cod obsession of Portugal.

Most questions work the same way. A dish is described, by its ingredients, its method, its place in daily life or on the festival table, and you choose which country it belongs to from four options. The explanation then fills in where and when it appeared, how it is really made at home as opposed to abroad, the ingredient or migration that made it possible, and the fun fact or the family feud attached to it.

Because so many great dishes are shared, contested or the product of mixing, the quiz leans into that rather than pretending each one has a single clean owner. Pad thai was promoted by a government. The Berlin doner was invented by Turkish migrants. Ceviche, jollof rice, pavlova, gallo pinto, the arepa and hummus are all claimed by more than one country, sometimes furiously, and the answers say so and give the case for each side.

The quiz also keeps circling a few big themes. How preservation shaped taste: rendang and biltong and salt cod and fermented shark all began as ways to keep meat or fish edible without a fridge, and the flavour was a side effect people came to love. How poverty invented classics: ratatouille, gazpacho, colcannon, pierogi, koshari and the Cornish pasty were all thrift before they were pride. And how colonialism and migration rewrote menus everywhere, leaving the baguette in Vietnam, the chilli in Bhutan, curry custard in a South African bake and a Lebanese rotisserie behind the Mexican taco al pastor.

A few questions turn it around: the country is given and you name the dish, or identify the ingredient or technique at its heart. Where a photograph of the food or a key ingredient would not simply give the answer away to someone who already knows the cuisine, it is shown with the question; the most globally familiar dishes are left as text so the picture is not a giveaway.

The point of a world-cuisines quiz is that it makes the map delicious. Learn that rendang is a way of preserving meat without a fridge, that the fork-and-knife rules for a Danish open sandwich are real, that a shark has to rot for months before Icelanders will eat it, and the world gets a little larger and a lot hungrier. The wording is kept plain, and every claim has been checked against reliable sources.