Rene Arend invented McNuggets while working as a chef. He created them to solve problems with ensuring a steady supply of raw material, determining proper cooking times before flash-freezing, freezing time, and frying time.
Vikas Khanna wrote a book titled "The Non-Alcoholic Drinks" about non-spirituous drinks in India.
Michael Ruhlman wrote a 2013 book detailing the history and use of schmaltz, or rendered chicken fat.
2. • 1) Contrary to the scenario postulated by D’Angelo Barksdale in an
episode of The Wire, Rene Arend, the inventor of the ________, is
in reality a highly skilled chef who retired from his well-paid job in
the mid-nineties.
• Arend came to America from his native Luxemburg to work as chef
at Chicago’s Whitehall Club, where he caught the eye of a regular,
who went on to make Arend the executive chef of the company he
owned.
• Arend’s first creation for the company was the ________, which
involved solving four problems: ensuring a steady supply of raw
material, determining proper cooking times before flash-freezing,
actual freezing time and the proper amount of time for frying.
• Fill in the blanks with a fast food item that is supposedly available in
four shapes: ball, bell, bone (or bow-tie) and boot.
5. • 2) Chef Vikas Khanna recently launched a
book on non-alcoholic drinks aimed at the
Indian market. “Unlike the rest of the world,
India has a lot of non-spirituous drinks. We all
have vivid memories of our comfort drinks,”
says Khanna. What is the title of the book, one
which essentially removes the negative in an
iconic literary (and cinematic) order?
8. 3) This is the cover of a 2013
book by food writer Michael
Ruhlman, detailing the history
and use of a certain traditional
cooking medium. Fill in the
blanks with an eight-letter word
that has also entered the
English language as a metaphor
for sentimentality.
11. • 4) Forming part of a word that means "a fine
food store" in most of the world and "a
grocery store cum cafe" in the US, the name of
which European city (pop. ~500,000)
translates to "to eat"?
14. • 5) At many of the protests surrounding the
preparations for the 2014 Soccer World Cup,
protestors were seen carrying bottles of
vinegar, and holding vinegar-soaked rags to
their faces to neutralise the effects of the tear
gas being used by riot police.
• This led to the riots being given a nickname
that involves one of the more popular uses of
vinegar. What nickname?
17. • 6) This traditional dish arrived in the UK in the
1960s. On how to eat it, Bon Viveur magazine
instructed in 1969: “All grab forks, spear
cubes, swirl in the mixture and convey at
speed to inelegantly wide-open mouths”.
What communal dish of European origin?
22. The FSSAI Licence logo (which replaced the ISI/BIS logo) and the
Green Dot/Brown Dot vegetarian/non-vegetarian symbol.
23. • 8) Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, took a two-year
trip to China around 1845 and published a travelogue
in which he described his adventures.
• His memoir captured the imagination of Victorian
society, and Fortune was approached by a
representative of one of the most important (if not the
most important) multinational corporations in the
world. The company recruited Fortune to return to
China — with a secret mission. Fortune was successful
and hence maybe changed the course of world history.
What was Fortune's mission?
25. • To obtain/ steal samples of tea plants for
cultivation in India and Sri Lanka.
26. • 9) The Etruscan civilization of ancient Italy practised
Alectryomancy, or the art of telling the future by
observing roosters pecking at grain. Once the
ceremony was completed, the rooster was sacrificed
and eaten. A belief rose among them that the furcula
of the rooster, if preserved, would bring the person
who possessed it good luck.
• This is the origin of what custom, one which has led to
the furcula of poultry acquiring a nickname, and which
is often seen at traditional Christmas and Thanksgiving
meals?
29. • 10) In some parts of the world it is called
Hawaiian Ahi Tuna. But the Olive restaurants
in Bangalore prefer to prefix Yellowfin Tuna
with an Indian region's name, as it is fished
prolifically there. Which region?
35. • 12) As they were nutritious and easy to cultivate, they
was one of the most historically important crops, quite
likely the first grown in South America.
• Western explorers like Columbus were quick to take
them to the Old World. Even before Columbus, they
seems to have crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and New
Zealand, a fact used by Thor Heyerdahl to justify his
Kon-Tiki expedition to prove that Polynesians originally
came from South America.
• What crop?
38. • 13) The blanket term for traditional African-
American cuisine originated in the fifties, and
is analogous to the style of music that was
pioneered around the same time by
performers such as James Brown, Ray Charles,
Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke. What two-word
term?
44. • 15) One of the earliest recipes for this dish,
often eaten at breakfast, appears in a 1450
cookbook and refers to it as “pain perdu”, or
“wasted bread”, suggesting that this recipe
was seen as a method of using stale bread
instead of simply discarding it. What dish, one
which has around a dozen names across the
world today?
46. • French toast, also known as gypsy toast,
German toast, Spanish toast, Bombay toast,
eggy bread, aliter dulcia, tostees dorees,
Pavese, arne ritter, etc.
47. • 16) Umberto Eco on the greatest "invention" of the Middle Ages.
• The poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless
they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching. This
poor diet begat a population that was ill-nourished, thin, sickly,
short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th
century, the cultivation of _____ began to spread, it had a profound
effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as
a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more
children and repopulated a continent.
• We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have
changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we
Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and
the Spanish conquistadors -- are still here because of _____.
Without _____, the European population would not have doubled
within a few centuries; and surely the history of other continents
would have been different, just as the commercial history of Europe
would have been different without Chinese silk and Indian spices.
• Fill in the blanks.
50. • 17) The next slide shows what results when
the flower bud of a member of the thistle
family is not harvested when still immature
(as is usually the case) and is instead left to
bloom fully. Name the plant.
54. • 18) Many countries world over have banned
its production over the last decade or so, but
in July 2014 India banned its import, making it
the first and only country with such a ban –
even though its consumption here is very low.
What product, subject of much protest by
animal rights' activists?
57. • 19) The following slide shows the MyPlate Chart,
a food chart created by the US Department of
Agriculture in order to provide Americans with an
idea of what a balanced meal should consist of
(i.e. a 40:30:20:10 ratio of
vegetables:grains:proteins:fruit).
• What much-criticised chart, a staple of doctors’
offices the world over, did it replace? Also, who
unveiled the MyPlate chart in 2011, a public
figure who was (and is) seen as the face of
healthy eating in America?
60. • The MyPlate chart replaced the Food Pyramid
chart, and was unveiled by Michelle Obama.
61. • 20) "For all her chic thinness, she had an
almost breakfast cereal air of health, a soap
and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening
in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose
upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out
her eyes. .... I thought her anywhere between
sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was
shy two months of her nineteenth birthday".
Who is she from a 1958 work?
64. • 21) Two members of the legume family are
used for food flavouring; one is fenugreek. The
other is not soya bean, as soy sauce is a
condiment, not a flavouring. What is this
other legume flavourant, a key ingredient in
Worcestershire sauce?
67. 22) Wells Bombardier _______
____ is a bitter ale brewed by
Wells & Young’s Brewery in
Bedford, England. It takes its
name from a two-word phrase in
one of England’s most popular
poems (which gained much of said
popularity only after being set to
music). This name also happens to
be quite a good description of the
colour of the beverage. Fill in the
blanks.
69. • Burning Gold, from the lines “Bring me my
bow of burning gold/Bring me my arrows of
desire” in the anthem “Jerusalem”, originally
written by William Blake.
70. • 23) Brazil nuts don’t only come from Brazil – Bolivia is a
larger exporter – but they do only come from the rainforest
region that takes up the mass of Brazil. what is often
forgotten is that there is another nut from Brazil which is
much more widely consumed if less identified with the
country.
• They originated in Brazil’s northeast, the easternmost
corner of South America and were taken to colonies like
Mozambique and Goa by the Portuguese colonisers.
• What nut, described by a French priest in 1558 as a weird
fruit: “shaped like a goose-egg”, from the base of which
“hangs a sort of nut, as big as a chestnut... as to the kernel
therein, it is excellent to eat when lightly cooked.”
73. 24) Seen here is a _________ pan, a specialized piece of
cookware used to make a type of small cake flavoured with
almonds. Fill in the blanks with a name that has a significant
literary connection.
75. • Madeleines, as featured in Marcel Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time.
76. • 25) If your diet included 1 apple, 2 pears, 3
plums, 4 strawberries, 5 oranges, 1 piece of
chocolate cake, 1 ice cream cone, 1 pickle, 1
slice of Swiss cheese, 1 slice of salami, 1
lollipop, 1 piece of cherry pie, 1 sausage, 1
cupcake, 1 slice of watermelon and 1 green
leaf, what would you be as per the title of a
multiple-award-winning 1969 childrens’ book?