This peach trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the fruit from every side. The botany: what a drupe is, why nectarines are the same species, how many hours of winter chill a tree needs and why a late frost is a grower's nightmare. The history: domestication in China thousands of years earlier than anyone thought, the Roman 'Persian apple', the Spanish who carried it to the Americas and the Navajo orchards Kit Carson burned. And the culture: Peach Melba, the Bellini, the fuzzy navel, the Peach Bowl, Ty Cobb, Momotaro, Roald Dahl and Princess Peach. The opening questions suit a summer picnic or a classroom; the back half will test a fruit grower or a food historian. Every answer comes with a short explanation. Every question has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's peach article and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The peach was first domesticated in which country?
China
The Latin name persica is a leftover of the Roman belief that peaches came from Persia, a mistake botanists repeated for centuries.
Q 02A peach with a fuzz-free glossy skin is sold under what name?
Nectarine
It is the same species; a single recessive gene switches off the fuzz.
Q 03Peaches, cherries, plums, apricots and almonds all belong to which genus?
Prunus
All of them sit inside the rose family, Rosaceae.
Q 04Which US state earned the nickname 'the Peach State' in the decades after the Civil War?
Georgia
It earned the name in the three decades after the Civil War, when its orchards boomed.
Q 05Which country grows roughly two-thirds of the world's peaches and nectarines?
China
No other country produces more than about five percent.
Q 06In China the peach is a traditional symbol of what?
Longevity
The god Shou Xing is usually shown holding one, and peach-wood charms were hung over doors to keep out evil.
Q 07Peaches whose flesh pulls cleanly away from the pit are called what?
Freestone
Clingstones, which hold the pit tightly, are the ones that usually end up in cans.
Q 08Because of its hard seed casing, the peach is botanically classified as what kind of fruit?
A drupe
'Stone fruit' is the everyday name for the same thing.
Q 09Peach trees are relatively short-lived. Roughly how long do most last?
Under 20 years
UC Davis puts a commercial tree at about 15 years; in Maine it is closer to seven.
Q 10What did the ancient Romans call the peach?
Persicum malum
'Persian apple' passed through Late Latin pessica and Old French pesche to become the English word.
Q 11The English name for the smooth-skinned peach was coined in 1611 as an adjective meaning what?
Nectar-like
It first appeared in print in 1611.
Q 12Nectarines are often mistakenly believed to be a cross between a peach and which other fruit?
Plum
In fact the fuzzless skin comes from a single recessive allele; the fuzzy peach skin is dominant.
Q 13The 2014 research pushing peach domestication back to about 6000 BCE came from which Chinese province?
Zhejiang
The oldest peach stones come from the Kuahuqiao site near Hangzhou in the Yangtze delta.
Q 21Peaches are 'climacteric' fruits, meaning they do what?
Keep ripening after picking
Vitamin C is still higher in fruit ripened on the tree, and the ripening blocker 1-MCP ruins the aroma.
Q 22Raw peach flesh is roughly what percentage water?
88%
A medium peach is about 46 calories, and more than half its sweetness comes from sucrose.
Q 23Which country has the greatest genetic diversity of peach cultivars, with 495 recognised varieties?
China
That is the usual signature of a crop's homeland.
The flat, doughnut-shaped peach is known in Chinese as what?
Q 14Fossil peach stones dating back 2.6 million years were found near which Chinese city?
Kunming
They are so like modern pits that palaeontologists gave them a species name honouring the city.
Q 15The oldest known artistic depictions of peaches are wall paintings preserved by which volcanic eruption?
Vesuvius
The Herculaneum fragments now hang in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Q 16Who first brought the peach to the Americas?
Spanish explorers
By 1580 it was growing in Latin America, and Native Americans in Virginia were raising it by 1629.
Q 17In 1864 Kit Carson's expedition destroyed thousands of peach trees in Canyon de Chelly to break which people?
The Navajo
After the 1868 treaty they returned, replanted from saved pits and resprouted stumps, and had orchards again within two decades.
Q 18Most peach cultivars need 600 to 1,000 hours of winter chilling at roughly what temperature range?
4 to 10 °C (40 to 50 °F)
Temperatures below −1 °C do not count, which is why the tropics can only grow peaches at altitude.
Q 19Peach blossom is damaged or killed once spring temperatures drop below roughly what?
−1.1 °C (30 °F)
The trees flower early, which is why a late frost can wipe out a whole season's crop.
Q 20Peach leaf curl, the fruit's most serious fungal disease, is promoted by which weather condition?
Cool winter rain
Growers in wet-winter climates lean heavily on fungicides as a result.
Pan-tao
Peacherines, sold in Australia and New Zealand, are claimed to be a peach-nectarine cross.
Q 25The peach genome, published in 2013, has how many chromosome pairs?
Eight
About 227 million nucleotides and roughly 28,000 protein-coding genes were mapped from the Lovell rootstock.
Q 26Escoffier created Peach Melba in the 1890s to honour an opera singer from which country?
Australia
The first version came perched on an ice swan, a nod to Nellie Melba's role in Lohengrin.
Q 27Along with peaches and vanilla ice cream, what is the third essential ingredient of a Peach Melba?
Raspberry sauce
Escoffier added the sweetened purée topping when he moved to the Ritz Carlton and warned that any variation 'ruins the delicate balance'.
Q 28The Bellini cocktail of peach purée and Prosecco was invented at Harry's Bar in which city?
Venice
Giuseppe Cipriani named it after the painter Giovanni Bellini, whose pinks reminded him of the drink.
Q 29A fuzzy navel is a mix of peach schnapps and what?
Orange juice
Add a shot of vodka and it becomes a 'hairy navel'.
Q 30The first recorded cobbler recipe, in the 1839 Kentucky Housewife, was for a 'Peach Pot Pie or' what?
Cobler
Grunts and slumps are New England cousins named for the noise they make while cooking.