American Food Trivia
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This American food trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and covers the dishes the United States invented, adopted or argued about: the burger's four rival birthplaces, the Buffalo bar that fried the first wings, the Philadelphia hot dog stand that switched to steak, the salad created in Mexico for thirsty Prohibition-era Americans, and the canned meat Hawaii buys seven million tins of a year. It runs through regional classics (barbecue styles, Cincinnati chili, po' boys, Hot Browns, clam chowder), snack-aisle icons (Oreos, Twinkies, Cracker Jack, tater tots), holiday food (Thanksgiving turkey and the casserole from a soup company test kitchen), and Chinese-American and Tex-Mex dishes with surprising origins. Easy questions sit next to genuinely hard ones, and each shows its difficulty. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation, so the origin stories here are the documented ones, not the ones on the diner placemat.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By the best-known account, Buffalo wings were first served in 1964 at which Buffalo, New York bar?
Anchor Bar
Anchor Bar co-owner Teressa Bellissimo is credited with deep-frying wings, a cut that usually went into the stock pot, as a late-night snack for her son's hungry friends.
Q 02Hot dog vendors Pat and Harry Olivieri are credited with inventing which sandwich in the early 1930s?
Cheesesteak
By the family's account, the cheesesteak began as Pat's own lunch of chopped beef and onions on a roll; a cab driver asked for one and told him to forget the hot dogs, and the cheese was only added years later.
Q 03The Caesar salad, a fixture of American menus, is said to have been created on July 4, 1924 in which city?
Tijuana
Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant in Tijuana serving Americans dodging Prohibition; his daughter Rosa insisted the original had Worcestershire sauce but no anchovies.
Q 04Which company introduced Spam in 1937?
Hormel
Hormel built Spam around pork shoulder, a cut that otherwise sold poorly; World War II then made it a household name as millions of pounds went overseas to feed Allied troops.
Q 05Which US state eats the most Spam per person?
Hawaii
Hawaii's Spam musubi, a slice of the meat on rice wrapped in nori, is a local staple; the taste dates to World War II, when Spam fed GIs stationed across the islands.
Q 06In which country is Ignacio Anaya said to have invented nachos in the 1940s for US military wives from Fort Duncan?
Mexico
By the usual story, Anaya, working at a restaurant in Piedras Negras, Mexico, couldn't find the cook, so he melted cheese over fried tortilla triangles with jalapeños; the name is probably his nickname, Nacho.
Q 07Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Windy City restaurant?
Pizzeria Uno
Pizzeria Uno's founders Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo get the credit, though their chef Rudy Malnati Sr. may deserve it; the cheese goes under the chunky tomato sauce.
Q 08Which chain, founded in Wichita in 1921, is credited as the first fast-food hamburger chain?
White Castle
White Castle built small white buildings with stainless steel interiors and put its staff in spotless uniforms to win over diners wary of ground beef since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
Q 09Despite their Chinese-restaurant fame, fortune cookies most likely reached America with immigrants from which country?
Japan
Japan had the cookie first: bakers in Kyoto made a very similar cracker holding a paper fortune in the 1800s, and San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden is said to have served them by the early 1900s.
Q 10Which dessert did Florida designate its official state pie in 2006?
Key lime pie
Key lime pie leans on canned condensed milk, probably because fresh milk and refrigeration were scarce in the isolated Florida Keys; the filling should be pale yellow, never green.
Q 11Which dessert did David Strickler create at a Latrobe, Pennsylvania, pharmacy in 1904?
Banana split
The banana split cost a dime, twice the price of other sundaes, yet students from a nearby college spread the word; Wilmington, Ohio, makes a rival claim dated 1907.
Q 12Which sandwich is said to be named for an Omaha grocer who ordered it at his weekly hotel poker game?
Reuben
The Reuben, in Omaha's telling, was made for grocer Reuben Kulakofsky at the Blackstone Hotel, whose owner then put it on the lunch menu; New York deli owner Arnold Reuben has a rival claim.
Q 13The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?
The Brown Derby
Q 21Which Cincinnati chili chain did Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides found in 1949?
Skyline Chili
Skyline Chili is named for the city view from its first restaurant; Lambrinides had cooked at Empress, the original Cincinnati chili parlor, before opening his own place with his sons.
Q 22Which US president served 'a pie called macaroni' at a state dinner in 1802?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef James Hemings, who trained in France, is credited with bringing the dish home; dinner guest Manasseh Cutler recorded the 'pie called macaroni' in his account of the meal.
Q 23In which country is Kraft macaroni and cheese known as Kraft Dinner, or simply KD?
Canada
Robert Howard Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby, supposedly threw it together from kitchen leftovers late one night in 1937, and it went on the menu chopped in neat rows.
Q 14Which hot dog brand began as a nickel stand on Coney Island in 1916?
Nathan's Famous
Nathan's Famous was started by Nathan Handwerker, a roll slicer at Feltman's on Coney Island, who quit and undercut his old boss by charging five cents a hot dog instead of ten.
Q 15Which condiment do purists famously ban from a Chicago-style hot dog 'dragged through the garden'?
Ketchup
Ketchup is the outcast: purists say its sweetness drowns the dog's salty toppings, and the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council's etiquette guide rules it out for anyone over 18.
Q 16Ed Waldmire's Cozy Dog, first sold in Illinois in 1946, was an early version of which snack?
Corn dog
The corn dog nearly had a worse name: Waldmire first sold his batter-dipped franks as 'crusty curs' until, by the family's telling, his wife Virginia objected and they settled on Cozy Dogs.
Q 17Which frozen-food company created Tater Tots in 1953 to use up leftover slivers of cut potato?
Ore-Ida
Ore-Ida's tots sold slowly at first because, the founders guessed, the low price made them seem worthless; sales took off once the company charged more.
Q 18Which state's pork barbecue splits between a vinegar-pepper sauce east and tomato-tinged 'dip' west?
North Carolina
North Carolina takes the split seriously: a bill to give Lexington's barbecue festival a statewide official title stalled in 2005, and a 2007 compromise confined the title to the Piedmont Triad.
Q 19Which barbecue city is best known for pork ribs served either 'wet' or 'dry'?
Memphis
Memphis ribs come dry, coated in a spice rub and served without sauce, or wet, basted as they cook; Charlie Vergos opened his basement Rendezvous in 1948 selling ham sandwiches and added the dry ribs in the 1950s.
Q 20At a Cincinnati chili parlor, what does ordering a 'three-way' get you?
Spaghetti, chili and cheese
Spaghetti, chili and cheese make a three-way; the Kiradjieff brothers, who sold chili-topped hot dogs beside a burlesque theatre from 1922, devised the 'way' system of ordering.
Canada took to it in wartime, when rationing made meatless meals common and a box kept for ten months without a fridge; by a 2012 count Canadians ate 55 percent more per person than Americans.
Q 24Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in whose corporate test kitchen?
Campbell Soup
Dorcas Reilly devised it at Campbell Soup for an Associated Press feature that wanted a quick dish from things most homes kept on hand, green beans and cream of mushroom soup.
Q 25Since 1989, what happens to the turkey presented to the US president each November?
It is given a mock pardon
It is given a mock pardon, a ritual the elder George Bush made permanent in 1989; President Kennedy had sent his 1963 bird back to the farm with no pardon, saying he would let it grow.
Q 26What flavour was the original Twinkie filling when James Dewar invented the snack cake in 1930?
Banana cream
Dewar's original was banana cream; a wartime banana shortage forced the switch to vanilla that stuck. The name came from a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes.
Q 27The Oreo, launched by Nabisco in 1912, was an imitation of which earlier sandwich cookie?
Hydrox
Hydrox, launched by Sunshine in 1908, came first, yet the later Oreo far outsold the cookie it copied.
Q 28By company lore, Cracker Jack was first shown to the public at a world's fair in which city in 1893?
Chicago
Brothers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim are said to have sold the popcorn, peanut and molasses mix at Chicago's 1893 exposition; it clumped until Louis found a way to keep the kernels apart in 1896.
Q 29Cracker Jack is named in the chorus of a 1908 song about which sport?
Baseball
Baseball's Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written, by lyricist Jack Norworth's account, after he saw a subway sign for a game at the Polo Grounds; he did not attend a major league game himself until 1940.
Q 30Which style of clam chowder is made with a clear broth, with neither milk nor tomatoes?
Rhode Island
Rhode Island keeps its chowder clear; the earliest recorded clam chowders had no milk either and were thickened with crackers or stale bread.