A short while back, I attended a trivia night Atwood’s Tavern in Cambridge. Much to my delight, the theme of the evening’s questions was food!

Unfortunately, most of the trivia was along the lines of, “Which Yugoslavian-based 80’s hair band had a song named after a luncheon meat?”

There were, however, some fun questions such as:

• How many flowers appear on each side of an Oreo cookie?
• What was the original purpose of the string on a box of animal crackers?
• What is the most consumed spice worldwide?
• What was the first condiment ever sold by Heinz?
• Arachibutyrophobia is fear of what?
• The margarita was named after the first name of which Hollywood starlet?

(Answers at the bottom of this post)

Overall I have a problem with trivia questions on which you cannot make at least an intelligent guess. After wading through a good twenty minutes of trivia with underivable answers, a question finally came that I thought I could truly figure out–even though I had no clue of the answer.

The question was this:

“In 1986, Ronald Reagan once mentioned that he enjoyed fancy french soups. This caused a backlash from his opponents charging him with elitism. As a response, he publicly issued a recipe for his “favorite” All-American soup. What type of soup was it?”

With fingers to throbbing temple, I thought long and hard as to what this could be. Chicken noodle?–probably Eastern European or Asian. Matzah ball soup?–Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. Tomato soup?–Italian immigrants.

Clam Chowder! That’s thoroughly American, and even specific to US regions (New England, New York, Rhode Island).

But wait–Reagan was from the farms of Illinois. So there was little chance that he could have grown up eating clam chowder. And maybe clam chowder is considered just a bastardization of some creamy bouillabaisse. So what would it be?

Then it came to me like divine flash. The perfect derived answer.

Corn Chowder!

How perfect of an answer was that? Chowder is American. Corn is American. Ronnie grow up in the farmlands. I could think of no better answer in the world, so it MUST have been the correct answer.

So, with hubris overflowing, our team handed in the card with the glorious answer, and waited for the trivia girl to pronounce the verdict.

After a few moments, she goes up to the microphone and says…

“HAMBURGER SOUP”

WHAT?!?!?!?! My jaw dropped, my heart sunk, my hopes shattered into a million rapidly-dimming shimmering pieces as the beautiful fantasy world of my wishing was engulfed in sea of despair. What a horrid, unimaginably stupid answer that was–especially because it wasn’t the one I picked!

Anyhow, after calming down, I needed to know what exactly hamburger soup was. The trivia girl must have anticipated this, as she handed out the recipe to us all.

Here is the original recipe as it appeared in 1986 in all of its glory:

I’m too embittered at the rejection of my perfect answer to make this one. Plus it looks pretty horrid. Drop me a line if you do.

Answers: 12 flowers per side, hanging it on a Christmas tree, pepper (salt is not a spice), horseradish (pickles were the second), fear of peanut butter, Rita Hayworth

3 Comments Crazy Stuff, Food/Recipes, Misc, Thought