Peach Trivia
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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
Nectarine is the name for a fuzzless peach: it is the same species, not a hybrid, and a single recessive gene switches off the fuzz.
Q 03Peaches, cherries, plums and apricots all belong to which genus?
Prunus
Prunus is the stone-fruit genus within the rose family, Rosaceae; its members share a single hard pit inside fleshy fruit.
Q 04Which US state earned the nickname 'the Peach State' in the decades after the Civil War?
Georgia
Georgia earned the name in the three decades after the Civil War, when its growers shipped trainloads of peaches north and the orchards boomed.
Q 05The fuzz on a peach's skin is made of tiny hairs called what?
Trichomes
Trichomes are the fine hair-like outgrowths of the skin's epidermal cells that give a peach its fuzz; stomata are pores and lenticels are breathing spots in bark.
Q 06In China the peach is a traditional symbol of what?
Longevity
Longevity is what the peach stands for: Shouxing, the god of long life, 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
Freestone peaches release the pit cleanly and are the ones sold for eating fresh; clingstones, which hold the pit tightly, usually end up in cans.
Q 08Because of its hard seed casing, the peach is botanically classified as what kind of fruit?
A drupe
A drupe is a fruit with a fleshy outer layer around a hard, woody shell enclosing the seed; 'stone fruit' is the everyday name, and olives and mangoes are drupes too.
Q 09Roughly how long does a typical peach tree stay productive?
Under 20 years
Under 20 years is typical: commercial orchards are commonly replanted within 10 to 15 years as yields fall, and few peach trees stay productive much beyond 20.
Q 10What did the ancient Romans call the peach?
Persicum malum
Persicum malum, 'Persian apple', was the Roman name because the fruit reached them by way of Persia; it shortened to persica and came into English through Old French pesche.
Q 11Yellow peach flesh gets its colour from which group of pigments?
Carotenoids
Carotenoids, the same pigment family that colours carrots, give yellow-fleshed peaches their colour; white-fleshed varieties lack them, and the red blush on the skin comes from anthocyanins.
Q 12Nectarines are often mistakenly believed to be a cross between a peach and which other fruit?
Plum
Plum is the usual guess, but the fuzzless fruit is simply a peach carrying a recessive allele that switches off the fuzz; no plum is involved.
Q 13The 2014 research pushing peach domestication back to about 6000 BCE came from which Chinese province?
Zhejiang
Zhejiang's Kuahuqiao site, near Hangzhou in the Yangtze delta, yielded the oldest peach stones from a domestication sequence, which the 2014 study dated to about 8,000 years ago.
Q 21Peaches are 'climacteric' fruits, meaning they do what?
Keep ripening after picking
Keep ripening after picking is what climacteric means: the fruit produces a burst of ethylene that goes on softening it and developing its aroma off the tree, which is why peaches are shipped firm.
Q 22Raw peach flesh is roughly what percentage water?
88%
88% water is close to the USDA figure for raw peach flesh, which is why a 100-gram serving carries only about 39 calories.
Q 23Samuel Rumph's Elberta peach was introduced in which decade?
1870s
1870s: Samuel Rumph of Marshallville selected the Elberta and released it in 1875; it shipped well by rail and became one of the most widely planted peaches in the country.
Q 14Fossil peach stones dating back 2.6 million years were found near which Chinese city?
Kunming
Kunming, in Yunnan, is where the late Pliocene stones were found; they are so like modern pits that palaeontologists gave the species the name kunmingensis, after the city.
Q 15The oldest known artistic depictions of peaches are wall paintings preserved by which volcanic eruption?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in 79 CE and so preserved a fresco of peaches beside a glass jar of water, a painting later moved to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Q 16Who first brought the peach to the Americas?
Spanish explorers
Spanish explorers carried the peach to the Americas in the 16th century; by 1580 it was growing in what is now Latin America, and native trade spread it north long before English settlement.
Q 17In 1864 Kit Carson's expedition destroyed thousands of peach trees in Canyon de Chelly to break which people?
The Navajo
The Navajo were starved into surrender and marched to Bosque Redondo on the Long Walk; after the 1868 treaty they returned to Canyon de Chelly and replanted its peach orchards.
Q 18Peach leaf curl is caused by a fungus of which genus?
Taphrina
Taphrina deformans is the fungus behind peach leaf curl, which puckers and reddens new leaves in spring; the other great peach disease, brown rot, is caused by a different genus.
Q 19Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which the body breaks down into which poison?
Cyanide
Cyanide is released when amygdalin, concentrated in the kernel inside the pit, is broken down by enzymes in the gut, which is why peach kernels should not be eaten in quantity.
Q 20Peach leaf curl, the fruit's most serious fungal disease, is promoted by which weather condition?
Cool winter rain
Cool winter rain washes the fungus's spores onto swelling buds, so the infection takes hold in wet late winters and early springs; growers in such climates rely on dormant-season fungicide sprays.
Q 24The flat, doughnut-shaped peach is known in Chinese as what?
Pan-tao
Pan-tao, the 'flat peach', is the doughnut-shaped fruit that Chinese legend places in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West; Western growers sell it as the Saturn or doughnut peach.
Q 25The peach genome, published in 2013, has how many chromosome pairs?
Eight
Eight chromosome pairs make up the peach genome, sequenced from the doubled-haploid Lovell rootstock: about 227 million nucleotides carrying roughly 28,000 protein-coding genes.
Q 26Escoffier created Peach Melba in the 1890s to honour an opera singer from which country?
Australia
Australia was Nellie Melba's homeland; Escoffier's first version at the Savoy came perched on an ice swan, a nod to her role in Lohengrin.
Q 27Along with peaches and vanilla ice cream, what is the third essential ingredient of a Peach Melba?
Raspberry sauce
Raspberry sauce, a sweetened raspberry purée, completes the dish: Escoffier added it when he reworked the recipe at the Carlton Hotel in London around 1900, after the Savoy original of the 1890s.
Q 28The Bellini cocktail of peach purée and Prosecco was invented at Harry's Bar in which city?
Venice
Venice's Harry's Bar is where Giuseppe Cipriani created it between 1934 and 1948, naming 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
Orange juice is the mixer, the 'navel' in the name coming from navel oranges and the 'fuzzy' from the peach; add a shot of vodka and it becomes a 'hairy navel'.
Q 30Grunts and slumps, the stovetop cousins of peach cobbler, come from which US region?
New England
New England is home to grunts and slumps, peaches or berries stewed under dumpling dough on the stovetop and named, it is said, for the noise the fruit makes as it cooks.