Not Delia

Quick Foodie Quiz 17 – answers

—

by

Not Delia
in

Here are the answers:

  1. What is Bûche de Noël?
    1. A French Christmas recipe for a Yule log
    2. A well-known Swiss cookbook with recipes for Christmas
    3. A Canadian pastry traditionally made at Christmas
    4. A Belgian liqueur distilled from birch sap, traditionally drunk on Christmas Eve

      5. (You can find a great recipe for Bûche de Noël on Mike K-H’s New Freebooters blog)

  2. What does au gratin mean?
    1. Served with a cheese sauce
    2. A dish sprinkled with cheese and/or breadcrumbs then browned on top
    3. A sandwich made French-style, like a croque, with the cheese on the outside
    4. Garnished with a roux-based cheese and parsley sauce
  3. In culinary terms, what does marc mean?
    1. A joint of meat used only to provide flavour to a dish rather than for the meat itself
    2. A method of infusing fruit with alcohol in a technique similar to macerating
    3. A clear alcohol made from the pressed grapes after wine making
    4. It’s another word for cocotte (a small dish for baking individual soufflés etc)
  4. Who wrote the book Ballymaloe Cookery Course first published in the UK in 2001?
    1. Donna Hay
    2. Delia Smith
    3. Darina Allen
    4. Jeanne Rankin
  5. What is charcuterie?
    1. Prepared meat products (such as sausages, patés, hams, etc) made from any kind of animal
    2. Prepared meat products as above, but made from pork only
    3. Any kind of meat prepared according to French butchery techniques
    4. French salami-style sausage

      5. (I’ve always thought that charcuterie meant any kind of cold cut – predominantly pork, but not exclusively. In researching this question, I thought I might have been wrong all these years when I found that the glossary in The Conran Cookbook says that it’s specifically pork. But when I dug a little deeper I discovered that that’s a commonly held fallacy among English speakers, based on the over-simplified translation of charcutier as “pork butcher”.)

How did you get on?

Comments

2 responses to “Quick Foodie Quiz 17 – answers”

  1. Mike Kingdom-Hockings

    Yes, school text books have a lot to answer for. Mind you, pork is an ingredient of the vast majority of charcuterie products.

    ‘Charcuterie’ comes from ‘chair cuite’, literally ‘cooked meat’, although a lot of it was smoked or salted in 1475, when the profession of ‘chair cuitier’ was established as being separate from that of ‘boucher’. However, the chair cuitiers didn’t gain the right to slaughter their own pigs until the 16th century. They had to buy them from the bouchers.

  2. Not Delia

    Thanks, Mike! That’s very interesting. I guess I escaped the misinformation from the school text books as I didn’t do French at school.

    I’ve not visited very many charcuteries in France, but I have very fond memories of one in particular. It was quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen in Britain. It seemed to be a multi-purpose place – a bar, a shop, and a charcuterie. We were spending a long weekend with a Frenchman I knew, Celestin, and his family (an absolutely wonderful man, we became great friends even though we barely had any language in common). Anyway, I digress.

    Celestin took Mr ND and me to a charcuterie. I thought we’d simply gone out to buy some food. But, no. We sat a table and were served pastis while we sat back and relaxed. From time to time Celestin would shout through “????”. (I told you I can’t speak French.) And we continued to drink our pastis and chat.

    After an hour or so, we got our bill and a bag of groceries. Celestin had been doing the shopping while we’d all been sitting there drinking and having fun. Now THAT’S the best way to go shopping! 😀

Leave a Reply