The Food History Quiz — 20 Questions on Forgotten Food
The food history quiz
What was garum, the seasoning Romans put on almost everything?
Garum was made by packing oily fish with salt and leaving them to ferment for weeks in the sun. It supplied salt and umami at once — the Roman kitchen's default seasoning, and Italy's colatura di alici is its living descendant.
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Where were the oldest written recipes found?
Around 25 recipes survive on Babylonian clay tablets from roughly 1750 BCE — mostly rich stews, written for cooks who were already expected to know what they were doing.
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What happened to silphium, Rome's most prized seasoning?
Silphium grew only around Cyrene, resisted cultivation, and was over-harvested until it vanished. Pliny records a last stalk sent to Nero as a curiosity — a flavour no living person has tasted.
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Why did Mesoamerican cooks soak maize in lime or wood ash?
Nixtamalization softens the kernels for grinding and unlocks the niacin bound up inside them. Societies that later adopted maize without the technique suffered epidemics of pellagra; Mesoamerica had solved the problem millennia earlier.
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What did medieval peasants eat most days?
Pottage was the daily meal: grains, pulses and whatever the garden gave, simmered in the single cauldron most households owned and topped up for days on end.
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True or false: medieval people drank ale because the water was unsafe.
It's a myth that refuses to die. Medieval people drank plenty of water and knew perfectly well which springs were clean. They drank ale for taste, calories and custom — much of it weak 'small ale' brewed at home.
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What was a medieval blancmange?
The original was savoury-sweet: chicken pounded to threads, cooked with rice and almond milk, lightly sugared and spiced. Its slide into a nursery pudding is one of the clearest cases of a dish changing completely while keeping its name.
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At a medieval table, what was a trencher?
Food was served onto slabs of stale bread that soaked up the juices. Afterwards the sauce-soaked trencher went to the poor at the gate — or to the dogs.
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What made Spartan 'black broth' black?
Melas zomos was pork boiled with the animal's blood and sharpened with vinegar. A visiting gourmand supposedly tasted it and said he finally understood why Spartans did not fear death.
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What is verjuice?
Verjuice is pressed from unripe grapes and was medieval Europe's everyday acid, doing the job lemon does for us. Strip it out and medieval recipes read as cloying — which is exactly how they got their bad reputation.
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How long could a well-made, dry-stored ship's biscuit last?
Hardtack was baked and then dried until almost no moisture remained, because moisture is what mould needs. Kept dry it could survive a decade — which is precisely why it fed the world's navies for centuries.
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How did the Norse preserve cod for long Atlantic voyages?
Stockfish is split cod hung on racks in cold, dry northern air until it loses most of its water. It needs no salt at all, keeps for years, and is light — preservation as navigation.
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Sushi began life as what?
Edomae nigiri was invented at the yatai — portable stalls feeding workers who had no kitchens of their own. The fish was marinated in soy because there was no ice in Edo. Japan's most refined cuisine started on a street corner.
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In Persian cooking, what is tahdig?
Tahdig means 'bottom of the pot' — the layer that crisps against the pan while the rest of the rice steams above it. It's turned out and broken over the top in shards, and it is the most fought-over part of the meal.
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What supplied the deep savoury note in Han-dynasty Chinese cooking?
The Han transformed soybeans by fermentation into salty, intensely savoury pastes and beans. They did for Chinese cooking what garum did for Rome — and they are the distant ancestors of soy sauce.
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Why is hippocras strained through a cloth 'sleeve'?
The conical filter bag was called the manicum Hippocratis — Hippocrates' sleeve — which is where the drink gets its name. A hippocras should be clear and fragrant, and it is nothing like boiled mulled wine.
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How many plums are in a Victorian plum pudding?
Despite the name it contains no plums: 'plums' meant raisins and currants. The pudding descends from a medieval spiced meat broth that gradually lost its meat and stiffened into the dark, boozy sphere the Victorians set alight.
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In the Mesoamerican milpa, what do the beans do for the maize?
Maize gives the beans a stalk to climb; the beans replace the nitrogen the maize strips out; the squash sprawls below, shading weeds and holding moisture. It is a farming system and a nutritional system at once.
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Why is West African fonio nicknamed 'hungry rice'?
Fonio is extraordinarily fast and tough, thriving in poor, dry, sandy soil where little else grows. It feeds people through the lean season before the main harvest — a crop with a future as much as a past.
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What actually cooks the food in an earth oven like the Pacific umu?
Fire-heated stones go in the pit, food wrapped in leaves goes on top, and the whole thing is sealed. What cooks it is hours of trapped heat and steam — which is why a tightly covered tray in a low oven can imitate it.
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