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

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.

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.

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.

bitter water

It comes from the Mexican word chocolatre, meaning “bitter water.” Originally, it’s said that Indigenous peoples of Mexico crushed cacao beans and drank them as a medicinal beverage. After it made its way to Europe, it evolved into forms with added sugar and eventually into something to eat.