B2 Food & Eating Vocabulary: Cooking Verbs, Idioms and Restaurant Language
This B2 Food and Eating Vocabulary module covers 55 entries in three groups — the precise cooking verbs (simmer, marinate, garnish, whisk, knead), the restaurant register (chef, cuisine, delicacy, connoisseur, palate), and ten food idioms that are not about food at all: spill the beans, a piece of cake, the icing on the cake. Ten words come back from the A2 food module. Every entry comes with flashcards, a word-formation drill, a collocations match and a twelve-question quiz, free and self-scoring.
- 55 entries
- 5 practice modes
- 12-question quiz
- Free progress tracking
- No sign-up
What’s inside this module
Five stages: revisit what you know, meet the new entries, build other forms from them, pair them with the words they normally go with, then test yourself.
Words you already know
A warm-up deck of eight words you first met at A2 — taste, meal, cook, fresh, rich, sweet, bitter, appetite. Each card shows what you knew before and what changes here, and the change can be considerable: cook turns up in cook the books, which has nothing to do with a kitchen.
Flashcards
Fifty-five cards, each with the entry, its part of speech, a B2 definition, an example sentence, and typical collocations on the back — whisk the eggs, ask the sommelier, an acquired taste. Rate each card “I knew it” or “Still learning” and your ratings are saved automatically.
Word formation
Eight gap sentences that ask for a different form of a word you have just met: indulge becomes indulgent, digest becomes digestible, nourish becomes nourishment, marinate becomes marinade. Feedback is the odd one out — it grew out of feed and left food behind completely.
Collocations & phrases
Ten pairs from the register end of the topic: an acquired taste, a rare delicacy, a wine connoisseur, a discerning palate, a loyal clientele, a home-cooked meal, a dietary staple.
12-question quiz
A mix of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank, with an explanation after every answer, right or wrong. Your best score is saved automatically.
How to get the most from it
Five habits that make B2 vocabulary stick, not just pass a quiz.
The idioms are not about food
Spill the beans means reveal a secret, a piece of cake means something easy, and the icing on the cake is a final bonus on top of something already good. Ten of the fifty-five entries work this way, and translating them word by word will fail every time.
Cooking verbs are precise, not decorative
Simmer is not boil, roast is not bake, and dice is not cut. Each verb fixes a temperature, a method or a size, which is exactly why they belong at B2: they let you describe a meal or a recipe exactly rather than approximately.
Register is half the point here
Cuisine, delicacy, connoisseur, clientele and gourmet belong to reviews and formal writing, not to a conversation about lunch. Knowing where a word belongs is a B2 skill in its own right — calling a sandwich gourmet is a mistake even though the meaning is perfectly clear.
Come back for the re-deal
After you finish the flashcard deck, it automatically rebuilds itself from just the words marked “still learning.” A short second pass on the hard ones is worth more than repeating the whole deck.
Use one this week
Describe one dish you can actually cook, using two cooking verbs and one adjective from this deck — simmer, season, roast, tender, hearty. A real recipe in four sentences fixes these verbs better than the cards alone can.
More food vocabulary
Three levels of one topic, built so the words do not repeat: B1 covers eating out and diet, C1 covers the figurative and low-frequency end.