Answer: B. Multiple larks are called an “exaltation.”  The 1882 cookbook 366 Menus and 1200 Recipes of the Baron Brisse recommends you use at least two to three dozen larks per pie, and if the seasoning is not enough, wrap them in bacon. Your guests will be singing your culinary praises.

Answer: D. A cake covered with jelly and freshly grated cocoa-nut. Try your hand making Bermuda Witches with this (condensed) recipe from Eliza Acton’s 1882 cookbook, Modern Cookery For Private Families: New Edition, published in London by Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. “[Thinly] slice equally some rice, pound, or Savoy cake; spread one half of it with Guava jelly, or with fine strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly of the best quality…  on this strew thickly some fresh cocoa-nut grated small and lightly; press [it]over the remainder of the cake, and trim [the slices]…pile them slopingly in the centre of a dish upon a very white napkin folded flat, and garnish them with small sprigs of myrtle.” 

Answer: C. Add specially prepared boiled spinach. If you answered D, Crème de Menthe, you were close, but it wasn’t invented until 1885 by pharmacist Emile Giffard, who was experimenting with the benefits of mint. So, for this question, enjoy your spinach-flavored ice cream. Dying to make your own? Find a recipe in famed Victorian-era chef Agnes B. Marshall’s cookbook The Book of Ices.

Answer: Yes, No, and Maybe. Although Phebe Bliss came from a family of Loyalists, her husband, the Reverend William Emerson, was an ardent supporter of the Patriot cause. On October 20, 1774, in response to the Intolerable Acts and other perceived injustices against the colonists by distant Parliament, the First Continental Congress agreed to a boycott of British goods. The boycott went into effect on December 1, 1774, and included the language that “from and after the first day of March next we will not purchase or use any East India tea whatsoever.” That’s March of 1775… so if you have it, you could serve it to the Emersons, but you may wish to let the decision steep until you read the room.

Answer: B. Apple-Howling. Standing in circles around the apple trees, the boys would chant,

“Stand fast, root! Bear well, top!

Pray God send us a good howling crop:

Every twig, apples big;

Every bough, apples enow!”

Answer: Louisa’s first book, Flower Fables. Written when Louisa was sixteen years old, Flower Fables was a collection of short stories Louisa wrote for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s youngest daughter, Ellen. Years later, the book was published just in time for Louisa to place the finished novel into her mother’s stocking on Christmas Eve. In the accompanying letter to her mother, Louisa wrote, “I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities.”

Answer: Harriot Lothrop. Lothrop, who wrote under the name Margaret Sidney, wrote most of the Five Little Pepper books while living at The Wayside, a house that was formerly occupied by the Alcotts and the Hawthornes. In The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, little Davie observed that the children “never had a Christmas.” His sister, Polly, often begged her mother to hang up stockings for her younger siblings, “but there was never anything to put in them, and the winters were cold and hard, and the strictest economy only carried them through.” 

Answer: B. Presents. “’Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”

Answer: B (Strawberries) and D (Cochineal Powder). As described in J. Thomson’s 1877 book Street Life in London, cochineal powder was used in ice creams to give a red color. Other than adding a grainy texture, cochineal did not contribute to the taste. Which is good since it was made of crushed bugs.

Answer: A: The Statue of Liberty.  Designed by French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s construction was started in 1876 and finished in 1884 when it was formally gifted to the United States. Giving definition to “some assembly required,” the statue was disassembled in France into 350 pieces, packed into 214 crates, and shipped to America where it was reassembled on Bedloe’s Island. Today, the island is called Liberty Island, and the statue is maintained by the United States Park Service.