Meals from Nora Ephron's 'Heartburn' Quiz

Answer: Lima beans

Lima beans get their name from the capital of Peru, as they were discovered there and originally grew in the Andes and neotropical lowlands of South and Central America. They are a staple ingredient in traditional Valencian paella. In order to be eaten, they must be cooked for at least 10 minutes.

Rachel Samstat's mother Bebe was a Hollywood agent and an excellent cook who went through phases; one of her signature dishes was salmon, sautéed onions and eggs, which she served during New Year football games, and another was a lima bean casserole with pears. The recipe for the casserole involves six peeled and sliced pears, six cups of defrosted lima beans, half a chopped onion, half a cup of molasses, and half a cup of chicken stock, all cooked together in a casserole dish. Rachel meets a woman at a party who has Bebe's recipe for pear and lima bean casserole.

Answer: Sorrel

Sorrel is in the same genus as dock leaves, the leaves you rub on your skin if you get stung by nettles. Wild and garden sorrel has been cultivated for centuries and has a sharp taste; it features greatly in Eastern European cuisine, such as the green borscht pictured here. It is not to be confused with the hibiscus tea drunk in the Caribbean.

Rachel thinks that now her husband has left her, she can make sorrel soup again. The sorrel soup in the book contains four cups of washed sorrel (Rachel warns that it has to be trimmed carefully to stop the soup being 'hairy'), four tablespoons of butter for sautéeing the sorrel, two and a quarter quarts of chicken stock, and four chopped peeled potatoes. Salt, pepper, red chilli pepper flakes, the juice of a lemon and a cup of double cream are added after blending the soup as seasoning, and the soup is served with lemon slices.

Answer: Hash

Hash gets its name from 'hâcher', which means 'to chop'. It is a dish of chopped meat (like the corned beef pictured here), fried onions and chopped or cubed potatoes. It was originally conceived as a way to use up leftovers and can be served with eggs, beans, toast and/or hollandaise sauce as a breakfast dish. It was popular in the Second World War, due to being cheap and relatively easy to cook.

Rachel's favourite hash is made of bacon and potatoes, which are cooked until they are completely crunchy. She likes it served with an egg.

Answer: Feta

Placenta, an ancient Greco-Roman dish, is the forerunner of cheesecake, being made of layers of dough and cheese and honey, flavoured with bay leaves. Ricotta, mascarpone and Philadelphia (or any other spreadable cream cheese) can all be used for cheesecakes, but sharp-tasting feta would taste a bit weird and has the wrong texture. There are many varieties of cheesecake, some with biscuit bases, some without, some baked, some unbaked. They can be chocolate, decorated with fruit like this one here, or flavoured with rosewater. Incidentally, Rachel is Jewish, and cheesecake is one of the dairy foods traditionally eaten on the festival of Shavuot.

According to Rachel, Amelia got her cheesecake recipe from a Philadelphia box. It is baked in a 9-inch pie pan and has a graham cracker base. The cheesecake mixture contains 12 ounces cream cheese, four beaten eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla and a cup of sugar. It is baked for 45 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, left to cool for 15 minutes, and then spread with a topping of two cups of sour cream and half a cup of sugar before being baked for ten more minutes.

Answer: Linguine

'Linguine alla cecca' means 'blind linguine'. Linguine is a long, flat pasta - its name literally means 'narrow flat pasta' - that originally comes from Genoa, and is thicker than spaghetti but thinner than fettuccine. It has its own day in the US, celebrated on 15th September. It is traditionally served with pesto, but in the US, it's not uncommon to find it served with seafood. The linguine in the photo is served with porcini mushrooms.

Linguine alla cecca is a pound of linguine served with a cold tomato and basil sauce. Rachel describes it as like eating a salad, and suggests making it in summer, when tomatoes are fresh. The ingredients of the sauce are five tomatoes, boiled, peeled, seeded and chopped; half a cup of olive oil; a cup of chopped fresh basil; a garlic clove cut in two; salt; and hot red pepper flakes. The sauce is left to sit for a couple of hours before the garlic is removed.

Answer: Bread

Bread pudding is a useful way of using up stale bread and making it delicious. It usually contains eggs, milk, fat such as butter, sugar, spices and dried fruits and/or nuts, like the one in the picture, which contains raisins. It was known as 'poor man's pudding' due to being relatively cheap to make, and originally only contained bread, water, sugar and spices; 13th century recipes added eggs and milk. A Central American version, capirotada, contains cane sugar and cinnamon, and sometimes chocolate; Belgian bread pudding contains apple; and a variant from the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern contains black bread.

When Rachel, Mark and their friends, the Siegels, are on holiday in New Orleans, they go to Mosca's and eat marinated crab, baked oysters, barbecued shrimp, spaghetti bordelaise, chicken with garlic and sausage with potatoes. They then eat oysters at the Acme, have beignets with chicory coffee at the wharf, and go to Chez Helene for the bread pudding. The bread pudding recipe is as follows: two cups of sugar are creamed with two sticks of butter. To this mixture, two-and-a-half cups of milk, a can of evaporated milk, two tablespoons each of nutmeg and vanilla, a loaf of wet bread and a cup of raisins are added. It is baked for two hours in a casserole at degrees Fahrenheit. Rachel suggests serving it warm with hard sauce, a mixture of butter, sugar and a spirit such as rum or brandy.

Answer: Peach

The peach is the state fruit of Georgia and one of its classic symbols; the legendary baseball player Ty Cobb was nicknamed the Georgia Peach, Justin Bieber sang about getting his peaches from Georgia, and the state even has a Peach County. Peaches were imported into the US in the 16th century and were planted in Georgia by Franciscan monks; the trees flourished in the Georgian soil and produced particularly sweet peaches. In the American Civil War, soldiers picked peaches growing on trees near the Georgian battlefields and marvelled at how sweet they were. Georgia also has an annual peach festival in - where else - Peach County, celebrated in the first weeks of June.

Rachel and Julie make various peach pies while on holiday in West Virginia, including deep dish peach pie and peach and blueberry pie. The ingredients for the pastry for Rachel's favourite peach pie are one-and-a-quarter cups of flour, half a teaspoon of salt, half a cup of butter and two tablespoons of sour cream, which are blended together, rolled into a ball, rolled out and then baked in a pie tin at 425 degrees Fahrenheit. The filling consists of three peeled and sliced peaches arranged in the pie crust, with a mixture of three beaten egg yolks, a cup of sugar, half a cup of sour cream and two tablespoons of flour poured over them. This is then baked for 350 degrees and cooked for 35 minutes while covered with foil, and a further ten minutes without the foil.

Answer: Anna

Swiss potatoes, also known as rösti, are grated potatoes made into pancakes and fried. Potatoes Anna, or pommes Anna, is a dish of French origin and is thought to have originated in the Napoleonic era. The chef Adolphe Dugléré is credited with creating it. It is unknown who 'Anna' is, but she is thought to either be the actress Anne Marie-Louise Damiens, aka Anna Judic, or the courtesan Anna Deslions.

Rachel says that when she falls in love, she begins with potatoes. She prefers to cook crisp potatoes at the beginning of a relationship as she believes that if she doesn't make them then, she never will, and they require a lot of work. Her potatoes Anna recipe uses three or four small russet potatoes, although she also suggests using Idahos, which are soaked in water and sliced into thin rounds. The rounds are dried with paper towels. These are then placed in a frying pan with a tablespoon of clarified butter, with the slices overlapping, and clarified butter, salt and pepper are dribbled over the potatoes; this process is repeated twice. The potatoes are then roasted at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes, and then 500 degrees for ten minutes.

Answer: Key lime

Key limes have a distinctive sharp taste, and are more aromatic than other limes. Although they are associated with Florida, as is key lime pie, they are originally from southeast Asia. The botanist Henry Perrine introduced them to the US. When bottled, their juice is yellow, rather than green, and they turn yellow when ripe. In the Middle East, they are boiled in brine and dried to make a condiment called black lime. (The other answers are all real lime species, by the way.)

Rachel is invited for dinner by her friend Betty, and Betty asks her to make a key lime pie for pudding. Earlier, Rachel had been to a jeweller and sold her wedding ring after finding out that Mark had bought a necklace for Thelma, his mistress. Rachel throws the pie in Mark's face and wishes she had chosen a blueberry pie instead, as it would have made more of a mess. Rachel's pie has a graham cracker crust; the filling is made with six beaten egg yolks, a cup of lime juice, two tins of sweetened condensed milk and a tablespoon of grated lime zest. The pie is then frozen, and served with whipped cream when defrosted.

Answer: Vinaigrette

Vinaigrette, as the name suggests, is a dressing made from oil and vinegar, although lemon juice or alcohol can be used instead. (The one in the picture is Paul Newman's balsamic vinaigrette.) Vinaigrette traditionally contains three parts oil to one part vinegar, and can be used as a salad dressing or marinade. It is an emulsion, meaning it is made from liquids that normally do not mix together, hence the blobs of oil in the photo. Some recipes also use herbs, mustard (which is what Rachel uses in hers) or shallots to add flavour; mustard also acts as an emulsifier.

On her last day in Washington, Rachel makes the vinaigrette for a salad and teaches Mark how to make it; the meal also includes bouillabaisse and creme brûlée. She uses two tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard and two tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Six tablespoons of olive oil are then added while the mixture is stirred slowly. She says that it goes well with salad greens such as rocket or endive.

Other recipes in the book that are not featured in this quiz are toasted almonds, four-minute eggs, Lillian Hellman's pot roast, and mashed potato.