Bacon Trivia
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98 free Bacon trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Bacon trivia questions with answers. Bacon has its own holidays, its own festivals and its own mayonnaise, so it can certainly carry its own trivia quiz. Forty questions cover the cuts (streaky, back, jowl, collar), how curing and smoking work, where the word comes from, the medieval flitch that gave us 'bringing home the bacon', the world's bacon styles from peameal to guanciale, and the American bacon mania that produced the Bacon Explosion and the Baconator. It starts easy and works up to genuinely obscure food history. Use it solo, at a brunch, or as a food round on quiz night; difficulty ratings are shown so you can pick your battles. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on bacon, curing and the dishes involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01American-style 'streaky' bacon comes from which part of the pig?
The belly
The belly is so central to bacon that US rules reserve the plain word for it: bacon cut from any other part of the pig has to name that part on the label.
Q 02Which cut does British back bacon include that streaky bacon does not?
The loin
The loin is the lean muscle that also gives pork chops, which is why a British slice eats more like a ham steak than a fatty American strip.
Q 03Which kind of bacon, in American usage, is the lean, round slice often served on eggs Benedict?
Canadian
Canadian is a name used only south of the border: in Canada the cut carries no nationality at all, and the plain word 'bacon' means the same streaky strips Americans fry.
Q 04Ontario's peameal bacon is rolled in what?
Cornmeal
Cornmeal later took over from the ground yellow peas that gave peameal bacon its name; the peas were first packed around the cured pork to help it keep.
Q 05Guanciale, the Italian cured meat used in carbonara, is made from which part of the pig?
The jowl
The jowl gives guanciale its name, from guancia, Italian for cheek; cooks melt its fat out in the pan, and that fat is what flavours the sauce.
Q 06Which Italian cousin of bacon is usually left unsmoked and often sold rolled?
Pancetta
Pancetta is cured with spices and then air-dried, so its strong flavour comes from the seasoning and the drying rather than from wood smoke.
Q 07Which part of the pig, also slow-smoked for pulled pork, is cured to make cottage bacon?
The boneless shoulder
The boneless shoulder, which butchers call pork butt, is leaner and much cheaper than the usual bacon cut, which is why home curers like it; the result is also sold as buckboard bacon.
Q 08From which part of the pig is British 'collar bacon' taken?
Near the head
Near the head: collar is the neck, a slightly fatty and relatively cheap cut that does not dry out, which makes it a good choice for long, gentle cooking.
Q 09Bacon is either wet-cured or dry-cured, meaning the pork is preserved by which two methods?
Brining and salting
Brining and salting are the wet and dry cures: most mass-produced bacon is pumped with brine because that takes hours, while a rubbed-on dry cure can be left to hang for up to two weeks.
Q 10Publicist Edward Bernays drew on his famous uncle's psychological theories to sell Americans on bacon and eggs; who was that uncle?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was Bernays's uncle, and the nephew used his ideas to promote sales of bacon, persuading a country that breakfasted on toast and coffee that a hearty plate was the healthier start.
Q 11Curing salt for bacon and ham is dyed which colour so that cooks cannot mistake it for table salt?
Pink
Pink is purely a warning: curing salt, often sold as Prague powder, is table salt mixed with sodium nitrite, and the meat's rosy colour comes from the nitrite reacting with the muscle, not from the dye.
Q 12USDA rules have long required bacon cured with celery-derived nitrites to carry which label?
Uncured
Uncured is a legal fiction: the rules count only synthetic nitrite as a curing agent, so bacon cured with celery powder must also say 'no nitrites added', though the chemistry is the same.
Q 13Which French word names the small strips or cubes of fatty bacon fried for coq au vin and beef bourguignon?
Lardons
Q 21'Macon', promoted in wartime Britain as a substitute for scarce bacon, was made from which meat?
Mutton
Mutton plus bacon gives the name; a Scottish MP pressed it on the wartime Ministry of Food, telling the Commons that any farmer's wife in Perthshire could show officials how to cure it.
Q 22Vegetarian bacon is often made from marinated strips of which fermented food?
Tempeh
Tempeh gets its bacon flavour from the marinade: the strips are soaked in seasonings such as liquid smoke, then fried or baked.
Q 23Imitation bacon bits, the kosher and vegetarian kind shaken over salads, are usually made from which crop?
Soybeans
Soybeans, processed into a textured protein and flavoured, make the imitation kind, so in the US it is inspected by the FDA while bits of real bacon answer to the USDA.
Lardons do double duty in a French kitchen: the fat they give up is used to fry the rest of the dish, and the fried pieces are added again at the end as a garnish.
Q 14What colour name do British butchers give unsmoked bacon?
Green
Green is used in its old sense of fresh or unprocessed, not for the colour of the meat; US meat inspectors still call the weight of fresh pork before curing its 'green weight'.
Q 15What do British cooks call a single thin slice of bacon?
Rasher
Rasher has been the word since the 1590s and nobody is sure why; one guess is an old verb 'rash', meaning to cut.
Q 16What does the Proto-Germanic root of the word 'bacon' mean?
Back meat
Back meat is the sense of the Germanic root *bakkon, kin to the word 'back', yet English did not inherit it directly: the word arrived through French in the 1300s.
Q 17Which English county gives its name to the bacon cure developed by the Harris family of butchers in Calne?
Wiltshire
Wiltshire's cure owes its mildness to ice: the Harrises chilled their curing rooms with it, so the bacon needed far less salt than the hard-salted kind it replaced.
Q 18In Essex's Dunmow Flitch Trials, what must a married couple prove to win a side of bacon?
No regrets for a year and a day
No regrets for a year and a day is the old oath: couples swear they have not wished themselves unmarried, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath was already joking about the Dunmow bacon in the 1300s.
Q 19Who sits on the jury at the modern Dunmow Flitch Trials?
Six maidens and six bachelors
Six maidens and six bachelors hear one counsel argue for the couple and another for the bacon; winners are carried through the town in a chair, and losers go home with a gammon.
Q 20Since the Second World War, how often have the Dunmow Flitch Trials normally been held?
Every leap year
Every leap year has been the rule since the war because, the organisers admit, four years gives them time to recover, though the run was broken when trials were staged in 2022 rather than 2020.
Q 24The WHO puts processed meats like bacon in its top cancer-evidence group, alongside which of these?
Tobacco smoking
Tobacco smoking shares the group, but the label measures the strength of the evidence, not the danger: the agency put the added bowel-cancer risk at about 18% for each daily 50-gram serving.
Q 25In World War II, Americans saved bacon grease to be made into what?
Munitions
Munitions makers needed glycerine for nitroglycerine, and it is a by-product of turning fat into soap, so butchers paid households for each pound of kitchen grease they handed in.
Q 26Which parasitic roundworm was the traditional reason bacon had to be treated or thoroughly cooked?
Trichinella
Trichinella larvae pass to anyone who eats infected meat undercooked, but farm rules have made pork a rare culprit in the US, where cases now usually trace to game such as bear and wild boar.
Q 27Which classic double-decker sandwich layers bacon with sliced chicken or turkey between three slices of toast?
Club sandwich
Club sandwich recipes go back to the 1880s and perhaps to a New York gentlemen's club; the earliest known one, from 1889, had ham rather than bacon and only two slices of toast.
Q 28The Bacon Explosion, an internet-famous barbecue dish, is bacon wrapped around what?
Two pounds of sausage
Two pounds of sausage are rolled inside a woven mat of two pounds of bacon; posted online two days before Christmas 2008, the recipe was drawing tens of thousands of visitors by Christmas Day.
Q 29Which fast-food chain introduced the Baconator in 2007?
Wendy's
Wendy's launched the Baconator during a back-to-basics turnaround under a new chief executive, who told an interviewer she could manage just one in a sitting.
Q 30The Bacon Explosion, a viral 2008 recipe, was the work of competition barbecuers based where?
Kansas City
Kansas City barbecuers Jason Day and Aaron Chronister built it to answer a dare on Twitter; the finished roll packs at least 5,000 calories.