World Cuisines Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which country's southern island chain gives its name to a pie of sweetened condensed milk set with the juice of small, sharp, yellowish limes and egg yolks, poured into a crumb crust and topped with meringue or whipped cream, needing no baking in its original form?

Question 2

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 3

Which United States island group is the home of the poke bowl, cubes of raw fish, most often tuna, seasoned simply with soy sauce, sesame oil, seaweed and sweet onion and eaten over rice, a dish that went from local fishermen's snack to global lunch trend in the 2010s?

Question 4

Which country's indigenous people cook a hangi, a feast of meat and root vegetables in flax or foil parcels lowered onto fire-heated stones in a pit, covered with wet sacking and earth, and left to steam underground for hours?

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 hearty bandeja paisa loads a single platter with red beans, white rice, minced beef, chicharron, a fried egg, plantain, chorizo, black pudding, avocado and an arepa, a mountain of food from the coffee-growing region around Medellin?

Question 7

Which country's method of stacking seasoned meat on a vertical rotisserie and shaving it off as it roasts gave rise to the doner kebab, and, via its emigrant communities, to the stuffed-flatbread sandwich version that became a signature fast food of Berlin from the 1970s?

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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.