World Cuisines Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which country treats larb as its national dish, a warm salad of minced meat or fish tossed with lime juice, fish sauce, chilli, herbs and a nutty powder of toasted ground rice, a version of which is also eaten across the north-east of its larger neighbour?

Question 2

Which country's national dish, praised in a poem recited at suppers held in the poet's honour every January, is a pudding of sheep's offal minced with oatmeal, suet, onion and pepper and traditionally simmered inside the animal's stomach lining?

Question 3

Which country's lecso is a loose stew of sweet yellow peppers and tomatoes cooked down in lard or oil with sliced onion and a shake of paprika, eaten on its own with bread, spooned over eggs, or used as a base for sausage and rice?

Question 4

Which country's Sichuan province is the source of mapo tofu, soft cubes of bean curd in a glossy red sauce of fermented broad-bean chilli paste, minced meat, and ground toasted peppercorns that leave the mouth tingling and numb?

Question 5

Which country's lunch tradition is the smorrebrod, a slice of dense buttered rye bread piled high with a single carefully arranged topping such as pickled herring, roast beef with crispy onions, or tiny shrimp, and eaten with a knife and fork?

Question 6

Which country's homely dish colcannon mashes potato with kale or cabbage, butter and spring onions, and is tied to Halloween, when small charms such as a ring or a coin were once hidden in the bowl to tell fortunes for the year ahead?

Question 7

Which country is credited by dictionary researchers with the first printed recipe, in 1927, for the pavlova, a dessert of a large soft-centred, crisp-shelled meringue topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit, and named after a Russian ballerina who toured both it and its neighbour?

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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.