Food and Cooking Quiz

About this test

Cooking is one of the few fields where the vocabulary is the skill. Blanch, deglaze, poach, confit, thicken: while those five words stay vague, every recipe reads as a list of arbitrary orders. Once they are clear, the same recipe becomes a sequence of understandable decisions you can adapt to whatever is in the fridge. So this quiz is as much about technique as about dishes.

The single most useful thing to know in a kitchen is not a recipe but a reaction: the Maillard reaction, described in the early 20th century by the chemist Louis-Camille Maillard. It is the meeting of sugars and amino acids above roughly 140 °C that produces bread crust, the colour of a seared steak, the taste of roasted coffee and of dark beer. It also explains why an overcrowded pan browns nothing: the water escaping from the food holds the temperature below the threshold, and you end up steaming instead of roasting.

A last note on origins: almost no dish is as old as people assume. Tomatoes only reached Europe in the 16th century, and so did chillies, while most so-called traditional cuisines were reinvented in the 19th. Finding out where a dish comes from usually means finding out that it comes from somewhere else.

How it works

Twenty questions with four options each, running from basic ingredients to the chemistry of browning, with exactly one correct answer every time. Your score is the percentage you got right, and the full breakdown appears at the end.