Deepen your knowledge of food! A three-choice trivia quiz

cucumber

The answer is cucumber. It’s more than 90% water, and while it’s not that it has no nutrients, its key point is being low in calories. You might think “hmm…” when you hear it’s the least nutritious vegetable in the world, but it does contain potassium and dietary fiber. It also pairs perfectly with ume (pickled plum) and salted kelp, making it an essential vegetable in summer.

cabbage

Cream puff, originally from France. The name comes from the French word “chou,” meaning “cabbage.” It was named this because the baked pastry puffs up into a shape resembling a cabbage. Before knowing this, you might think, “No way,” but once you hear it, it really does look like a cabbage, doesn’t it?

Because college students liked to eat it.

There are various theories, but it is said to have originated from being sold in Tokyo’s student districts from the Taisho through the Showa era, where it became extremely popular among students. In particular, shaved ice from a shop called Mikawaya, an ice vendor said to have operated in front of the University of Tokyo’s Akamon (Red Gate), is believed to have been especially well received by UTokyo students.

The “salad” in “salad oil”

It’s said that “salad flavor” refers to something tossed with vegetable oil and seasoned with salt. Since it evokes vegetables, it’s unexpectedly different if you don’t know the origin. There’s also a theory that the word changed from “salt” to “salad.”

The “pan” of a frying pan

It comes from a thin, flat pan—a frying pan. So the idea is something like a cake cooked in a frying pan. In English, “cake” seems to refer to a sweet food made by baking batter, which makes sense when you think of it that way. It became a trend around 2010 with the arrival of bills.

To make it easier to cook through

When cooking, they have holes so the heat passes through more easily. There are various theories, but it’s said that in 19th-century America, a sailor named Gregory found that the fried dough his mother made was undercooked, which led him to make a hole in the middle. By the way, Mr. Gregory is known as the inventor of the ring-shaped doughnut.

Ingredients

So they use different kinds of rice. Okaki are made with sticky glutinous rice (mochi-gome), while senbei are made with less sticky non-glutinous rice (uruchi-mai). If you eat them with that in mind, you might be able to notice the difference even more.