Food & Drink Trivia: Tasty Facts for Quiz Night

Food and drink rounds are always a crowd-pleaser because everyone has to eat. They are also full of surprises: plants that are not what they seem, dishes named after real people, and ingredients that travelled across the world. Serve up these facts and you will be the one calling out answers before the plates are cleared.

Fruit and Veg Surprises

• Bananas are botanically berries, while strawberries are not. A true berry keeps its seeds inside; strawberries wear theirs on the outside.
• A tomato is technically a fruit, though it is cooked like a vegetable. So are cucumbers, peppers and aubergines.
• Peanuts are not nuts. They are legumes, in the same family as peas and beans, and grow underground.
• Carrots used to be purple and yellow. The familiar orange carrot was developed by growers in the Netherlands in the 17th century.
• Avocados are fruits too — botanically, a large berry with a single seed.

Foods That Travelled

Many "national" foods use ingredients that came from another continent:

• Tomatoes came from the Americas. Italian cooking only adopted them after the 16th century.
• Potatoes were first grown in the Andes of South America, long before they became a staple in Ireland and across Europe.
• Chocolate comes from cacao, first used in Mesoamerica. The Aztecs drank it as a bitter, spicy drink.
• Chilli peppers came from the Americas too — before the 1500s, there were no chillies in Indian or Thai cooking.

Dishes Named After People and Places

• The sandwich is named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who, legend says, asked for meat between bread so he could eat without leaving his card game.
• Pizza Margherita is said to be named after Queen Margherita of Italy, with its red, white and green toppings matching the Italian flag.
• Caesar salad was created by Caesar Cardini, an Italian-born restaurateur, in Tijuana, Mexico — not in ancient Rome.
• Champagne can only use that name if it comes from the Champagne region of France.

Kitchen Records

• Saffron is the most expensive spice by weight. Each crocus flower produces only three threads, which must be picked by hand. Vanilla is usually second.
• Honey never spoils. Sealed jars found in ancient Egyptian tombs were still edible thousands of years later.
• Chilli heat is measured on the Scoville scale. Pepper X was named the world's hottest chilli by Guinness World Records in 2023.
• There are well over a thousand varieties of cheese made around the world.

Drinks With a Story

• Tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world after water. All true tea — black, green, white and oolong — comes from the same plant, Camellia sinensis.
• Coffee beans are seeds found inside a red fruit called the coffee cherry.
• Ketchup began as a fermented fish sauce in Southeast Asia. Tomatoes were added much later, in the West.
• Fortune cookies are not Chinese. They became popular in California in the early 20th century, with roots in Japanese baking.

Sweet Endings

• Ice cream cones became popular in the United States in the early 20th century, especially after the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
• White chocolate contains no cocoa solids — only cocoa butter, sugar and milk — which is why some say it is not truly chocolate.
• Vanilla comes from an orchid. Its flowers are often pollinated by hand, which is one reason it is so expensive.
• Nutmeg and mace come from the same fruit. Nutmeg is the seed; mace is the red, lacy covering around it.

How to Remember It All

Group your facts by course — starters, mains, drinks and desserts — and quiz yourself one course at a time. Better still, use them at the table: mention that the tomato is a fruit next time someone makes pasta. Facts you say out loud are much harder to forget.

Hungry for points? Play the free Cooking quiz and see how many of these you can serve up correctly.