Cheese Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This cheese trivia quiz has 117 free questions with answers, and every one is checked against a real source. It covers the famous names (cheddar, brie, feta, gouda, halloumi) and the strange corners of the cheese world: the Sardinian cheese sold with live maggots inside, the Serbian one that costs $1,300 a kilo, the French wheel that a university lab crowned the smelliest on Earth, and the English cheese that cannot legally be made in the village it is named after. It also gets into how cheese is made and eaten: what rennet actually does, why Emmental has holes, which president stank out the White House with a 1,400 lb block, why the moon was ever 'green cheese', and where archaeologists found 5,500-year-old milk-fat residue. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few that will stump a cheesemonger. It suits pub quiz rounds, foodie nights, wine-and-cheese parties, or just settling an argument about who knows their Roquefort from their Gorgonzola.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cheese is named for a Somerset village with a cave-filled gorge?
Cheddar
Cheddar takes its name from the Somerset village beside Cheddar Gorge, whose caves kept a steady temperature and humidity for ageing; tradition once required the cheese to be made within 30 miles of Wells Cathedral.
Q 02Which blue cheese became the first French cheese granted an appellation d'origine, in 1925?
Roquefort
Roquefort legend has a shepherd abandon his bread and ewe's-milk cheese in a cave to chase a girl, then return to find it veined with mould; it still ripens only in the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon.
Q 03Which English cheese cannot legally be made in the village it is named after?
Stilton
Only cheese made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire qualifies; the village of Stilton, where it was originally sold at a coaching inn, is in Cambridgeshire.
Q 04Which Sardinian sheep's-milk cheese, ripened by live insect larvae, is illegal to sell?
Casu martzu
Casu martzu is left open so that cheese flies lay their eggs in it; the larvae digest its fats until the paste turns soft and creamy, and Sardinians call it unsafe to eat once the maggots have died.
Q 05Pule, a rare Serbian cheese from the Zasavica reserve, is made mostly from which animal's milk?
Donkey
Pule is made mostly from donkey milk: only about 100 jennies at Serbia's Zasavica reserve are milked for it, and roughly 25 litres of milk go into a single kilogram.
Q 06Sales of which English cheese rose 23% after the 2005 film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit?
Wensleydale
Wensleydale is the cheese Wallace names as a favourite in the 1995 short A Close Shave, and the creamery later licensed an official Wallace & Gromit brand.
Q 07Which cheese is chased down Cooper's Hill at the annual cheese-rolling?
Double Gloucester
Double Gloucester, a wheel of about 7 lb, is sent down Cooper's Hill near Brockworth and the first runner to the bottom keeps it; the last official race drew 15,000 people in 2009, and locals have run it unofficially since.
Q 08Which grillable cheese must be made in Cyprus to carry its name in the EU?
Halloumi
Halloumi's high melting point lets it be fried or grilled without collapsing; the UK was by far its biggest buyer abroad in 2024.
Q 09Under EU rules, feta's sheep's milk may be mixed with up to 30% milk from which other animal?
Goat
Goat's milk may make up no more than 30% of feta, the rest being sheep's milk from the same parts of Greece; cow's-milk versions made elsewhere cannot use the name in the EU.
Q 10Which Spanish cheese has a zig-zag rind that copies the grass baskets once used to press it?
Manchego
Manchego was once pressed in bands of plaited esparto grass, which left a zig-zag called the pleita; modern moulds are carved to print the same pattern, so the rind still looks hand-woven.
Q 11Marie Harel, a farmer from Normandy, is traditionally credited with creating which soft cheese in 1791?
Camembert
Camembert is credited to Marie Harel, but what carried it far beyond Normandy was packaging: around 1890 a thin wooden box replaced the bed of straw, so the fragile cheese could finally travel.
Q 12Which Dutch city, birthplace of the stroopwafel, still holds a cheese market in front of its old weigh house?
Gouda
Gouda's cheese was traded in the city, not made there: farmers carted their wheels to the market square, agreed a price by handjeklap, slapping palms with every bid, and had them weighed at the Waag.
Q 13Which Dutch cheese, sold as red-waxed balls, keeps so well that it became a favourite on long sea voyages?
Edam
Q 21Havarti, renamed in 1952 after the farm where Hanne Nielsen worked, comes from which country?
Denmark
Denmark won EU protection for the name in 2019 after a four-year campaign, so only Danish dairies may sell Havarti in the EU, even though more than half of the world's supply is made elsewhere.
Q 22Jarlsberg, a mild holey cheese named after a manor estate, comes from which Nordic country?
Norway
Norway's Jarlsberg had vanished from the market before dairy scientists at its agricultural university rebuilt it in the 1950s from old Swiss-style recipes; the method is still a closely guarded secret.
Q 23Mozzarella takes its name from the Italian verb mozzare, which means what?
To cut off
Edam hardens with age instead of spoiling, so from the 14th to the 18th century it was the cheese of choice on ships and in distant colonies.
Q 14Which mild orange cheese takes its name from the Wisconsin town where it was first made?
Colby
Colby, Wisconsin, is where Joseph Steinwand washed his curd in cold water instead of stacking and turning it the usual way, which left a softer, moister and milder cheese.
Q 15Which mild white cheese traces back to Franciscan friars at Spanish missions in the 1700s?
Monterey Jack
Monterey Jack began as the queso del país of California's Franciscan missions; who first sold it is disputed, but land baron David Jacks shipped it under his own name and the label stuck.
Q 16Which bright-orange Lille cheese owes its grey rind to deliberately added cheese mites?
Mimolette
Mimolette's pitted grey rind is the work of cheese mites put there on purpose to bore in and deepen the flavour; in 2013 US inspectors held up imports because the wheels carried too many of them.
Q 17Which smelly washed-rind cheese originated in the Herve area of what is now Belgium?
Limburger
Limburger originated around Herve, in the old Duchy of Limburg, now in Belgium; Brevibacterium linens, the same bacterium found on human skin, is smeared on the rind and produces the smell.
Q 18Which beer-washed cheese from France's Channel coast did Cranfield University researchers rate the smelliest of 15 in 2004?
Vieux-Boulogne
Vieux-Boulogne beat 14 rivals in the test, which used an electronic nose; the researchers put its stink down to the beer on the rind reacting with enzymes in the cheese.
Q 19Charles Martell's Stinking Bishop cheese takes its name from what?
A variety of pear
A variety of pear called Stinking Bishop gave the cheese its name: the rind is washed in perry made from it, and the pear is said to be named after an irascible farmer called Bishop who bred it.
Q 20Which Italian blue cheese, named after a town near Milan, is said to have been created around AD 879?
Gorgonzola
Gorgonzola's blue veins are no accident: makers push metal rods in and out of each wheel so that air can reach the mould inside; the town it is named for lies just outside Milan.
Mozzarella comes from mozzare, 'to cut off', because the cheesemaker pinches portions off the hot, stretched pasta filata curd by hand to shape each ball.
Q 24Burrata, stretched curd filled with cream and cheese scraps, comes from which Italian region?
Puglia
Puglia's burrata is credited to Lorenzo Bianchino of Andria, who is said to have devised it to use up cream and scraps of mozzarella when snow kept him from getting his milk to town.
Q 25Ricotta, whose name means 'recooked', is traditionally made from which leftover of cheesemaking?
Whey
Whey left over from other cheeses is heated again to near boiling, so its albumin and globulin proteins clump into a fine, slightly sweet curd.
Q 26Which soft Italian cheese is made by thickening cream with acid and heat instead of rennet?
Mascarpone
Mascarpone is simply cream set with heat and an acid: no rennet, no starter culture and no ageing, which is why it tastes mild and faintly sweet where most cheeses are tangy.
Q 27Despite its name, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was first made in which state?
New York
New York dairyman William Lawrence began making it in the town of Chester in the 1870s; the Philadelphia name was added in 1880 purely as marketing, because that city was known for fine dairy.
Q 28Which dish did the Swiss Cheese Union promote as a national dish from the 1930s to sell more cheese?
Fondue
Fondue was a regional dish of French-speaking Switzerland until the Swiss Cheese Union, a cartel that controlled the country's cheese for decades, marketed it nationwide to shift its surplus.
Q 29Which processed cheese brand won the American Medical Association's seal of approval in the 1930s?
Velveeta
Velveeta was invented by Emil Frey to rescue broken wheels of cheese: he melted the scraps and dairy by-products into a smooth block and named it for its velvety texture.
Q 30Cheez Whiz was first developed for the British market as an instant sauce for which dish?
Welsh rarebit
Welsh rarebit, cheese sauce on toast, was slow to make from scratch, so Kraft's food scientists bottled a shortcut and launched it in Britain in 1952.