Cooking Terms, Part XIII Trivia Quiz

Answer: Beat them with a spoon, whip or beaters until well combined.

Ingredients other than butter and sugar may also be creamed. The process is one of beating ingredients together until they are united and become light and fluffy.

Answer: Setting fire to alcohol added to the hot dish

Flambé is a cooking technique in which an alcoholic beverage (rum, cognac, whiskey, or flavourful liqueurs, but neither beer nor wine) is added to the hot pan to create a high flame. This dramatic presentation has been popular since the late 19th Century. Modern examples of flambéed dishes include Crêpes Suzette, Cherries Jubilee, Bananas Foster and Steak Diane.

Answer: a thick dark soy sauce made of soy beans and (usually) without wheat, used especially in Japanese cooking

Pure tamari is safe for people on gluten-free diets, except that some brands of tamari are now made with wheat. It is also known in Japan as miso-damari. Citrus-flavoured soy sauce is called ponzu or ponzo shoyu. Black soy sauce is thick and sweet and sometimes labeled Siew Dam.

A family of sauces is called kecap in Indonesia (from which the English word ketchup derives). One of them is kecap ingriss (English sauce) which is very much like Worcestershire.

Answer: Chop it very finely

A mince is a finely chopped ingredient or combination of ingredients. Mincemeat (which, at one time in food history, actually contained meat) is a finely chopped pie-filling of fruits, nuts and fat. Its name comes from the extra-small dice into which the ingredients are cut.

Answer: 250-265 degrees F (121-129 degrees C)

When sugar syrup, heated to 250-265 degrees F, is dropped into a cup of cold water, it immediately forms a ball which is firm but still slightly pliable and not yet brittle. If it forms brittle strands, this is the "hard crack" stage which occurs at 300-310 degrees F. These tests were more important before the development and wide use of accurate candy thermometers.

Answer: dried salt codfish

For over 500 years, cod has been cleaned, salted and dried as a method of preservation. Dishes featuring this seafood are part of most maritime cuisines, especially those where the influence of Portugal was exerted, e.g. Brazil, Macao, Angola.

Answer: a latex sheath to protect a cook's cut finger

Cots are often coloured blue in order to find them easily, should they slip off an injured finger and end up in the food, very little of which is normally blue. This is very much at the center of the Season 1 episode of the 1993 BBC comedy series "Chef" entitled "Subject to Contract" in which Everton, one of the cooks, loses his sticking plaster somewhere in the food to be served that evening.

Answer: a deep-fried breaded ball of minced meat and/or vegetables

A croque monsieur is a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich and a croque madame is a similar sandwich to which a fried egg is added. Croquembouch is French for "crisp in the mouth" and is a dessert of custard-filled cream puffs covered in caramel and sometimes spun sugar.

Answer: Pearls

Tapioca pearls are normally between two and four millimeters in diameter. In addition to its use as a thickener, tapioca features in many cooked desserts. American Chef Thomas Keller innovated a signature dish called "Oysters and Pearls" in which he serves oysters atop a bed of tapioca pearls.

Answer: a utensil for removing shreds of zest from citrus peel

A zester is a handle to which a metal claw is attached, which claw is pierced by a number of fine holes with very sharp rims. Dragging the zester across the surface of a lemon, orange, lime or other citrus fruit cuts off a thin layer of fragrant, colourful, oil-rich peel, leaving the bitter pith behind. James Beard once referred to the zester as man's best friend.

More modernly, a microplane may be used to zest a citrus fruit.