Anne here, and today I’m offering a little quiz about historical food, just for fun.
1) Chocolate first arrived in which European country?
a) Portugal
b) England
c) Spain
d) Italy
2) Which famous lady had an enormous effect on French Cuisine?
a) Catherine de Medici
b) Marie Antoinette
c) Sisi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria)
d) Queen Elizabeth 1
3) Gin, which was a hugely popular drink in England, was invented in:
a) Scotland
b) Holland
c) India
d) Italy
4) Which country initially denounced coffee as “Satan’s Brew”?
a) England
b) Scotland
c) Germany
d) Italy
5) The famous insurance company Lloyd’s of London was named after:
a) A coffee house owned by Edward Lloyd
b) Joshua Lloyd, a prosperous international trader
c) Mary Lloyd, the mother of the founder
d) Frederick Lloyd, who lost 5 ships at sea.
6) In 1717, Thomas Twining
a) inherited a huge tea plantation in Ceylon
b) first brought tea to America
c) opened the first tea house for ladies in London
d) invented the tea-bag
7) Giovanni Giacomo was a famous gastronome of his time. He is better known as:
a) the man who originally established Gunter’s Tea shop
b) the Marquis de Lafayette
c) Don Quixote
d) Casanova
8) The word “restaurant” did not appear in its current meaning until
a) 1765 in Paris
b) 1788 in Venice
c) 1725 in Vienna
d) 1642 in London
9) Marmalade was invented by
a) The Portuguese who made it out of quinces
b) A Scottish woman whose son had bought a shipment of bitter oranges.
c) A chef in the court of Queen Isabella of Spain
d) An unknown cook in the court of King Henry VIII
10) Alexis Benoit Soyer was
a) a famous chef
b) famous for his charity work
c) chef at the Reform Club in London for a quarter of his life
d) all of the above
11) The process of canning food was:
a) invented by Leonardo da Vinci
b) developed in response to a competition offered by the French government
c) invented by a team of English scientists. 
d) invented by pioneers in the American west.
12) In 1828 the Dutch invented
a) a system of preserving ham
b) a process for safely pickling raw fish
c) a process that created eating chocolate
d) a way of preserving cheese for long periods at sea.
Now you have made your choices, click here and find out the answers. Then come back and tell us how you went. Did you have fun with this? Learn anything new? Anything that surprised you?
I love these quizzes. Except for the #7 (Casanova) every last one was a guess on my part. But I still managed to get 6 right. Learned some new things though.
Well done, Mary. Glad you enjoyed it.
Only 5, alas, but I enjoyed it very much. I always stumble over things related to the history of chocolate, probably because I try not to eat too much!
I know what you mean, Sally. After reading through various information about chocolate I bought a blog of choc-almond. *g*
I missed 4, 5, 6. Hard to get my head arount Italy, which has raised coffee to art, denouncing it. Though denunciation would make it more attractive. Hmm.
The rest I knew absolutely.
Thanks, Marsha. I do enjoy choosing unlikely facts for my quizzes.
Eight correct, but three of those were pure guesses! Missed food canning, Mr. Twining’s contribution – and QUINCE marmalade??? Always have fun with these quizzes, Anne – thanks!
Constance quince paste is wonderful stuff. The first I tasted was made by writer Elizabeth Rolls and it was superb. Alas, that was after we’d sole Mum and Dad’s house, with their enormous garden which included a quince tree. It fruited very prolifically, but I think they gave the fruit away. If I’d known about quince paste back then I would have made it.
5 for me…if I had thought the question through on a few more I would have gotten more….the chocolate question & the marmalade question!
Thanks, Cathie. You know I try to tease/trick you with likely-sounding alternatives. *g*
5 for me…if I had thought the question through on a few more I would have gotten more….the chocolate question & the marmalade question! Dutch processed chocolate & Spanish oranges! (I wasn’t going to give those away til a few others gave hints etc away…ps Anne LOVED this post. Pat always talks about rabbit holes – I always learn so much looking up in Wikipedia all those things I’m not sure of or even people mentioned in the Wenches books….with Google I’m down a winding rabbit hole easily! This quiz was fun because I learned so many fun facts!
Thanks, Cathie — I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I have been trying to think up topics for the quizzes, and this one arose because I’d started to write a blog about interesting food facts, but the post was so bitsy and I wasn’t happy with it. And then I thought, oh! I could turn the bits into a quiz. So I’m very pleased people have been enjoying it.
Amazingly, I only missed two! Numbers 3 & 4. Love these quizzes, whether I do well or not, they provide food for thought (not meant as a pun).
Thanks, Jane — I’m pleased you enjoyed it. And I would claim that pun. *g*
The Dutch word for gin was and is genever. Like English, Dutch has a lot of borrowed words, so you may be right they borrowed this one from French (I resisted the rabbit hole). Meanwhile, the English misunderstood genever to be Geneva, called it that, which in typical English fashion got shortened eventually to gin. Loved the quiz, missed 3.
Thanks, Yvonne. In some historical novels (looking I think at Georgette Heyer) gin was also called “Hollands.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary “Hollands is a now little-encountered term for a variety of gin originally made in the Netherlands. It is of a slightly higher strength than British and American gin, and also has a more pronounced flavour, so it tends to be drunk neat rather than serving as the basis for cocktails and mixed drinks.”
I love these quizzes! I got 8 right, I thought it would be the English who denounced coffee as Satan’s Brew! I also gave credit to the Scottish lady for inventing marmalade, and I didn’t know about Twining or the Dutch inventing eating chocolate. Speaking of orange marmalade, I think I have to learn to make my own, the bitter variety has gotten quite expensive and hard to find in the U.S.
Thanks, Karin. The Scots do claim dibs on Marmalade, but since the word comes from the Portuguese quince variety, I think they take the gong. I love marmalade on my toast, and buy a variety called English Breakfast marmalade. I don’t often see the seville oranges for sale — they’re the slightly bitter ones that make the best marmalade — so I very rarely make it. For a few years I used to buy some home-made marmalade that was the best I’d ever tasted. Alas it was from a local school where I used to go to vote,—voting is compulsory here, so you get a great turnout — and the parents ran stalls with cakes and preserves and sizzling hot sausages in bread to raise money from the school. The child of the brilliant marmalade maker sadly grew up and so no more fabulous marmalade.
Very nice! I got 7 correct out of 12. Some things I knew from reading regencies (Hollands gin, for instance), others from movies (Lloyds of London with Tyrone Power) and TV films (David Tennant in Casanova), others from chocolate wrappers (imported). What fun!
Glad you enjoyed it, Janice. I don’t remember the Tyrone Power movie, and I haven’t seen the David Tennant Casanova (a shocking omission!).
Pretty darn fun ( ;
I’m pleased you enjoyed it, Pamela.
I only got 5 but learned a whole lot here. Great fun Anne!
Ditto this!
Thanks Teresa.
I got 8 right! Yay me! Believe it or not, I actually knew those.
Well done Pat.
i missed 4,10,11. I love quizzes like that. So interesting and fun! Some i knew, some were process of elimination! I was surprised by both the answers to canning and the coffee denunciation by Italy(of all places!). And like, Janice, the Tyrone Power movie was the clincher for Lloyd’s of London! (And a good film, too!) with a nod to Admiral Nelson!
Thanks, Jane — glad you enjoyed it. And I do enjoy it when I come across an unlikely fact.
Five completely correct, 2 half correct. 5 totally wrong. Funnily enough, 2 of my complete guesses were completely right. Several of my totally wrongs were, Dang it, I knew that (I chose the wrong thing.)
Lots of fun as always and I definitely learned something. Thanks for a fun quiz!
Thanks, Vicki — the main thing is to have fun.
I got 4 of them right lol But I was surprised by some of the answers, particularly where chocolate arrived from.