← Back to C1 General contentsWorkbook · 9B. How to cook, how to eat
Home practice · compound & possessive nouns · preparing food · answer key included
1 · Compound & possessive nouns
Choose the correct possessive: 'This is ______ recipe.'
Choose the correct possessive: '______ shopping is done for the week.'
Which is a compound noun (noun + noun)?
'The children's menu' means:
Choose the natural form: '______ meat sauce.'
Rewrite as possessive: 'the recipes of the students'.
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2 · Complete with a cooking verb from the box
- drop the onion finely before adding it to the pan.
- Let the sauce drop for another twenty minutes.
- Always drop the meat with olive oil and rosemary the night before.
- You need to drop the parmesan straight over the pasta.
- She drop the garlic in the hot oil for about a minute.
- Taste it — you'll want to drop it more.
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3 · Rewrite as a compound noun or possessive
'a knife used for cutting bread' → (compound noun)
'the recipe of my grandmother' → (possessive)
'a sauce made of tomatoes' → (compound)
'the shopping of this week' → (possessive)
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4 · Match the kitchen expression to its meaning
- a chopping boarddrop or tap here…
- a wooden spoondrop or tap here…
- a frying pandrop or tap here…
- the sell-by datedrop or tap here…
- leftoversdrop or tap here…
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5 · Podcast · What the meal actually did
Listen to a first-person podcast monologue from a Portuguese food writer reflecting on the last real dinner at her grandmother's table.
📄 Show transcript
Speaker: So, last week, I shared a recipe that was actually my grandmother's. It got me thinking about her table, her seven o’clock weekday dinners. They were a fixture, a ritual, really. I still have her chopping board, you know, that sturdy, well-worn wooden one. Every Sunday, I use it when I'm preparing what I now call my Saturday’s proper lunch – a big, shared meal.
I sometimes wonder what we’ve actually lost. Not the shared meal itself, I don't think. Most of us still eat together, in some form or another. But I think what's genuinely been lost is the middle-class grammar of those meals. The way courses were served in order, food handed round, the unspoken rules. It was a language of its own.
My one piece of, perhaps, unromantic advice, if you want to recreate something of that feeling, is this: Invite one more person than you think you can feed. Then sit down. Don't fuss. Just eat, talk, be together.
- What compound noun does she use about the tool she has kept from her grandmother's kitchen?
- Which possessive + compound does she use about her weekly ritual?
- What does she say has genuinely been lost?
- What is her one bit of unromantic advice?
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6 · A short reflection (180–220 words)
Write a short first-person reflection titled: "The meal that survived." Use at least four compound nouns, three possessive forms and three cooking verbs. End with an honest, unromantic conclusion.
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