Guess the Dish

Oil is the fastest cuisine test

Fat colour is the single most informative thing in a close crop of food. Bright red chilli oil pooling at the edge is Sichuan or Korean. Deep golden oil with visible spice sediment is South Asian. A clear green sheen is olive oil, which puts you around the Mediterranean. Clarified butter reads as a pale even film; rendered pork fat is white where it has cooled.

Then the garnish, which is close to a signature. Flat-leaf parsley and lemon is European. Coriander leaf is Latin American, South Asian or South East Asian, and if it arrives with lime rather than lemon you are in the first or third of those. Spring onion cut on a bias is East Asian. Sesame seeds, toasted, are Korean or Japanese. A raw herb salad on the side is Vietnamese.

Dairy is a strong negative signal. Cream, cheese and butter sauces essentially do not appear in the East Asian entries in this deck, so a white sauce with a fat sheen sends you to Europe or to the small set of dishes that fuse the two.

Grain, char and vessel

Rice is worth learning to read. Long separate grains are Indian, Persian or West African; short round sticky grains are Japanese or Korean; a flat pan-crusted layer is paella or bibimbap depending on what else is in frame. Wheat behaves the same way: hand-pulled noodles, extruded pasta and a laminated pastry are three different worlds and all three are in this deck.

Char tells you the equipment. Discrete parallel grill bars mean a grate; irregular blistering means a very hot oven or a tandoor; an even golden crust means a pan. A blistered puffy edge with black spots is a wood-fired pizza and almost nothing else.

When the frame pulls back far enough to show the vessel, use it. A shallow wide steel pan, a stone bowl, a banana leaf, a paper-lined basket, a lacquered tray — the container is often more distinctive than the food in it.

The ladder and the deck

4.2x, 2.4x, 1.5x, then the full plate. Four rungs, and the last one really is the whole photograph, which makes the fourth rung more valuable here than in the other zoom games — plenty of dishes are unmistakable in wide shot and anonymous in close-up.

The 67 dishes lean French and Italian at six and five respectively, then China and Japan at four each, and then spread out across Mexico, Korea, the United States, Turkey, Greece, India, Indonesia, Peru, Brazil, Morocco, West Africa, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Quebec and a dozen more. Photographs come from Wikipedia, where food photography is mostly high-resolution volunteer work, which is what a zoom round needs.

Scoring

Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240. The reveal names the dish and where it is from. Playing hungry is not recommended and is entirely your own business.