The Author's Kitchen - Spanish Style Quiz

Answer: Cold

As Rimmer found out the hard way in 'Red Dwarf', when he was served gazpacho at the Captain's Table and he asked for it to be heated up, gazpacho is actually a chilled soup. ('Gazpacho soup' were also Rimmer's last words when the crew were killed in a radiation leak.) Thought to be of Roman origin, it was originally made with olive oil, bread, garlic and vinegar; tomatoes were added in the 19th century, and the tomato version became the most widely-known one, though other variants with watermelon, strawberries or avocado exist.

A Cordoba variant contains ham, and in northern Spain, pimentón (smoked paprika) or cumin is used as a flavouring.

Answer: Valencia

Paella is a signature food of Valencia and is named after the Valencian word for 'frying pan', though in other regions of Spain, the big pan in which it is cooked is called a paellera. The rice used in this paella gets its colouring from saffron threads soaked in water. Workers in rice fields would eat it for lunch and use nearby ingredients such as onions and tomatoes, and meats such as snail, rabbit, duck or, less commonly, chicken or water vole. The traditional paella valenciana also includes green beans and garrofons, a type of butter bean. The paella in the picture is a paella marisco, or seafood paella, while a paella containing meat and seafood is a paella mixto.

Valencian restauranteur Juan Galbis organised a team of workers to make an enormous paella in 2001 that served around 110,000 people. The pan used was a massive 21.5 metres wide.

Answer: Catalonia

'Pa amb tomàquet' is Catalan for 'bread and tomato' and can be eaten alone as a snack or as part of tapas. While the bread in bruschetta is rubbed with garlic and has chopped tomatoes on top, pan tumaca consists of slices of bread rubbed with a tomato mixture and seasoned with olive oil.

It can be served with sausage or other cold cuts, tortilla, cheese or grilled vegetables. A Majorcan variant, pa amb oli ('bread with oil'), uses a type of tomato called a Tomàtiga de Ramellet, which has a stronger taste. According to Catalan food historian Nèstor Luján, the juice of the tomatoes helped to soften dry bread.

Answer: Tortilla

In Mexico, a tortilla is a flatbread made from maize (and sometimes wheat) and used in dishes such as chalupas, enchiladas or quesadillas. In Spain, however, a tortilla is a thick omelette made with potatoes, and sometimes onion, tuna or red peppers. It is also known as a 'tortilla de patatas' or 'tortilla española' in order to distinguish it from the Mexican flatbread. In Barcelona, it is not uncommon to find sandwiches with slices of tortilla in them. Its origins are unknown; suggestions include the tortilla being invented by the Basque general Tomás de Zumalacárregui during the Siege of Bilbao, as it was quick and filling, or picked up by Spanish prisoners of war during the Portuguese Restoration War.

(As for the other answers: pozole is a meat and hominy soup, mole is a spicy sauce containing chocolate, and chapulines are fried grasshoppers.)

Answer: Black

Go to Spain and you'll probably encounter at least one shop filled with legs of Iberian ham hanging from the ceiling. The breed of pig used to make Iberian ham is the black Iberian pig, which lives in the Iberian Peninsula and eats acorns from oak and cork trees. To have the official designation, the pigs must either be purebred black Iberian pigs or fifty-fifty crossbreeds with Duroc pigs.

In Majorca and the Balearic Islands, their meat is also used to make sobresada or sobrassada, a sausage that can also be spread on bread in its soft form.

The pigs have fine bones due to moving around a lot, and their meat also has a high fat content.

Answer: Garlic

If something is 'al ajillo', it contains garlic. Gambas al ajillo, or garlic prawns, is a Spanish dish that was imported to Latin America and consists of prawns served in a garlic, paprika/pimentón and olive oil sauce and garnished with parsley. Some recipes also include additional flavourings such as lemon juice, dry sherry or red pepper/chilli flakes.

The Mexican variant contains guajillo chillis, dried mirasol chillis.

Answer: Raisins

In the UK, a flan is a pie-like pudding but in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, it's an egg custard with a caramel sauce (also known as 'crème caramel' in France). Multiple variants can be found in the pudding aisles of Spanish supermarkets.

In the modern version of the recipe, from 19th century France, the sauce is made by boiling sugar until it caramelises, and is poured into a mould before adding the mixture of eggs, sugar and milk. The pudding is then cooked in a bain-marie, turned out and served upside down with the sauce on top. Crema catalana, a Catalan variant similar to the French crème brûlée, uses orange or lemon as flavouring.

Answer: Chocolate

Spanish churros are similar to beignets or doughnuts, the difference being that they're tube-shaped rather than round. They are thought to either be a Portuguese import from China, or originally made by Spanish shepherds as a quick snack. They are piped from a machine called a churrera, which gives them their ridges, friend until they become crunchy and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

In some Latin American countries, the dipping sauce may be dulce de leche instead, and they can also be dunked in coffee, hot chocolate or - in Mexico - a thick spiced chocolate drink called champurrado.

Answer: Studded with raisins

You can get the South American kind of alfajores in Spain, but the Spanish alfajor is a different animal. It originates from Andalusia, one of the regions of Moorish Spain, and its name comes from the Arabic 'al-hasu', or 'filling'. They are finger-shaped, dipped in icing sugar and traditionally contain a mixture of honey, nuts and spices such as cinnamon or aniseed; alajú, a variant in the province of Cuenca, Castilla-La Mancha, contains figs.

When alfajores were imported to South America by the Spanish, they evolved into the type shown here.

Answer: No

If you go to Barcelona and walk down Las Ramblas, you'll see plenty of tourist restaurants with big pitchers of sangria on display. It gets its name from the Spanish and Portuguese word for 'bloodletting', because of its dark red colour. Authentic sangria can only be sold in Portugal and Spain, and if it is sold anywhere else, it must be labelled as '[insert country] sangria' under EU law. Red wine - such as Rioja - is the base ingredient, with different types of fruit such as peaches, berries, apples or even pineapples being added, depending on the region.

Some variants add orange juice, sparkling water or brandy, and alcohol-free versions using soft drinks instead of wine exist for children and non-drinkers.