Recorded answers
1,454 recorded answers
How to approach it
Treat the prompt as a texture test rather than a cuisine quiz. Walk through the world's kitchens and ask, for each, which preparations owe their form to a mortar, a food mill or a blender instead of to heat or to knife work. Write everything that surfaces in one unbroken list, covering dips, sandwich spreads, cooking pastes, thick sauces, mashed staples, fruit butters and dessert creams, then set the list aside for a moment, because the entries that arrive first are the ones everybody else will also write. For each idea still standing, step down to the most specific name you can honestly claim: the regional word, the dialect term, the trade name. Precision, not familiarity, is what this scoring rewards.
Get a hint
Start from the technique rather than from any national kitchen: any preparation whose recipe reduces to pound, crush or blend until smooth is a candidate, whether it reaches the table as a dip, a sauce, a spread or a sweet paste.
A little more
Then sweep the map region by region. Ground chilli bases in West Africa, vegetable mashes across South Asia, nut and pulse blends around the eastern Mediterranean, thick sauces in the Americas, seed and bean ferments in East Asia and fruit conserves in Europe all supply qualifying names.
One step further
Finally dig into the long tail: regional words in minority languages, dialect and trade terms, and products named by one ingredient plus a texture word will score far better than the handful of globally famous examples that the rest of the field is certain to submit.
Reveal answers 1,454
- Baby foodPlankton10points
- GuacamolePlankton10points
- HummusPlankton10points
- Mashed potatoesPlankton10points
Why these answers count
Here the points track rarity almost mechanically. The lone hundred-point entry, Moretum, is an ancient cheese-and-herb mash that hardly anyone would reach without specialist reading, and it sits alone at the top for exactly that reason. Directly beneath it, the 85-point band is a long, dense tail of regional names: 'Nduja, Aam panna, Aamras, Ajvar, Ajoblanco, Almogrote, Aligot and Aguají all landed there, each recognisable inside its own tradition but unfamiliar to a general solver. The 60-point tier is where the widely known preparations ended up, the ones hundreds of people submit at once, so the answer is validated but earns comparatively little. The lesson is that the game measures not how good a food is but how few rivals thought of it. Familiarity is the penalty; specificity is the reward.