Cooking

Welcome to Gentle Tongue-Tongue's Cooking Bonus! The sections below have good instructions; consider the bonus a recipe and follow along. Remember, you only have an hour: you'd better get cookin'!

SAUCES:

We all know life would be easier if sauces had names that actually described their ingredients. I mean, who would suspect that something made primarily of spinach would be called "Florentine?" But, life's hard. Identify the following sauces from their ingredients.

1. butter, parmesan cheese, heavy cream, garlic

2. cucumber, yogurt, garlic, lemon

3. egg yolks, oil, garlic

4. white wine, white wine vinegar, butter

5. egg yolks, lemon juice, butter, a few grains of cayenne pepper

6. dried chili peppers (several varieties), sesame seeds, almonds or cactus seeds, garlic, oil, chopped tomatoes, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, bittersweet chocolate

7. ketchup, horseradish, lemon juice, hot pepper sauce

While we're at it, for a random bonus, here's a transcription of a good ol' Yankee recipe. Tell us what it makes. For a bonus fraction of a point, tell us when the cookbook from whence this came was originally published:

"Sweeten a quart of cyder, with double refined sugar, and grate a nutmeg into it; then milk the cow into your liquor. When you have thus added what quantity of milk you think proper, pour half a pint, or more (in proportion to the quantity of !@#$%^ you make) of the sweetest cream you can get all over it."

This is a recipe for:

Published in:

TERMS:

Sometimes even cookbooks don't have all the information you need. They throw terms around without bothering to define them! Well, turn about is fair play. Given instructions, provide the correct cooking term.

1. Drop into boiling water, then rinse immediately in cold water

2. Soak food in alcohol or other liquid until it is soft

3. Gently add one ingredient to another by pulling a layer of one over the other

4. Cut vegetables into seven-sided pieces resembling small footballs

5. While we're at it, which cooking term comes from the French for "to jump"?

How many times have you sat down at a restaurant and not known what the menu said? Here's your chance to prove that you're a good date, with...

TRANSLATIONS

1. gobhi paratha

2. almejas y mejillones

3. hamachi

4. fufu

5. haggis

6. tom kha gai

7. kedgeree

8. pisse-en-l'aire

HOMEBREWING:

Brewing beer is cooking, too, as anyone who's ever homebrewed can tell you. Define the following brewing terms.

1. wort

2. mashing

3. carboy

4. sparging

5. What makes beer bitter?

6. Why do homebrewers use brown glass bottles instead of green?

BAKING BREAD:

1. What is gluten?

2. What is a baker's peel?

3. What is proofing?

4. What shape of loaf is a fougasse?

5. Name two kinds of bread that always include egg.

[gratuituous graphic of a six-armed chef brandishing knives and whisks here]

THE FINER POINTS OF EATING MEAT:

Gone are the days when any respectable gentleman knew how to carve, and any respectable housewife could identify cuts of meat...or are they? Identify the numbered parts of the pig below.

[outline image of pig's body, stolen shamelessly from "The Joy of Cooking," with lines demarcating the thirteen cuts of pork]

[gratuitous image of "A Hare or Rabbit Truffed for Roasting" taken from a seventeenth-century colonial American cookbook]

COOKING UTENSILS:

Identify the utensils depicted below.

[eleven images of strange cooking utensils; alas, not scanned-in yet]

ESSAY:

Give us your favorite recipe for banana bread. Be creative.

[one of the coolest essay answers involved the "banana breakfast" scene from the beginning of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," which -- given what Pynchon fanatics some of Tongue-Tongue are -- was a fabulous idea.]