Curry Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
45 free Curry trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This curry trivia quiz follows the dish around the world. It starts with where the word comes from and what medieval Indian proto-curries tasted like before chili peppers arrived, then moves through the classic dishes: rogan josh, korma, vindaloo, butter chicken, dal, Massaman, green and yellow Thai curries, rendang, laksa and Japanese curry rice, katsu and curry bread. It also covers the curious British chapter — Hannah Glasse's 1747 recipe, the first curry powder sold in a Piccadilly perfumery, the Hindoostane Coffee House, Veeraswamy, the Curry Mile, the Balti Triangle, phall, jalfrezi and the Glasgow origin story of chicken tikka masala — plus curry's odder offshoots like currywurst, coronation chicken, bunny chow and Caribbean curry goat. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest will stretch even people who cook this stuff every week. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's food articles and the sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'curry' most likely comes from a word in which language family?
Dravidian
Dravidian languages of South India supplied the word: Tamil kari means a sauce or relish, and Portuguese traders in Goa are thought to have passed it on to the English as caril.
Q 02Whose 1747 Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy included the recipe 'To make a currey the India way'?
Hannah Glasse
Hannah Glasse signed her bestseller only 'By a Lady', and for decades rumour credited it to a man; her currey fried chicken with spices, then finished it with cream and lemon juice.
Q 03Which key curry ingredient reached India only after the Columbian exchange?
Chili peppers
Chili peppers are a New World crop that Portuguese traders carried to Goa in the 16th century; before then, Indian cooking took its limited heat from black pepper.
Q 04Which gum resin from the genus Ferula was a key spice in medieval Indian proto-curries?
Asafoetida
Asafoetida, called hing in Hindi, is the dried latex of Ferula roots; its sulphurous stink mellows into a savoury, onion-like flavour once it hits a hot pan.
Q 05Dhansak, a stew of meat with lentils and vegetables, comes from which Indian community?
Parsi
Parsi cooks, descendants of Zoroastrians who left Persia for Gujarat, stretch costly meat with lentils and vegetables in dhansak; the dish later became a British curry-house standard.
Q 06Which fiery curry from Goa takes its name from a Portuguese garlic marinade for meat?
Vindaloo
Vindaloo began as carne de vinha d'alhos, pork in a garlic marinade; British curry houses turned it into a byword for heat, and stray potatoes crept in through confusion with the Hindi aloo.
Q 07Chicken tikka is traditionally cooked in which charcoal-fired clay oven?
Tandoor
A tandoor is a vase-shaped clay oven heated by a charcoal or wood fire inside it; skewered meat roasts in the fierce heat while flatbreads bake stuck to its inner wall.
Q 08Which spice gives curry powder its deep orange-yellow colour?
Turmeric
Turmeric is coloured by curcumin, a pigment so strong that it is approved as a food colouring in its own right; the spice's old nickname is 'Indian saffron'.
Q 09The curry tree, whose leaves flavour many South Indian dishes, belongs to which plant family?
Citrus
Citrus is the family, Rutaceae, of the curry tree; despite the shared name, the word curry does not come from the tree.
Q 10Which Indian dish was reputedly invented in Glasgow, possibly by chef Ali Ahmed Aslam?
Chicken tikka masala
Chicken tikka masala's best-known origin story has Ali Ahmed Aslam of Glasgow's Shish Mahal improvising a sauce for a customer who found his chicken tikka too dry; rival chefs dispute the claim.
Q 11Which Anglo-Indian soup takes its name from Tamil words meaning 'pepper water'?
Mulligatawny
Mulligatawny joins Tamil milagu, pepper, and tanni, water; the thin South Indian broth was much transformed for British tables, gaining meat such as chicken or mutton.
Q 12Which country's curries are scented with pandan leaves and seasoned with dried Maldives fish?
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka's cooks add Maldives fish, a cured and dried tuna, to their vegetable curries, where a little of it gives the dish a rich savoury depth.
Q 13Rogan josh, coloured red with alkanet, is a centrepiece of the wazwan, the multi-course feast of which region?
Kashmir
Kashmir's wazwan is the feast of weddings and Eid: a master cook and his team prepare course after course of meat overnight, and guests share it in fours from one large copper platter.
Q 21On which day of the week do Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force ships traditionally serve curry?
Friday
Friday is curry day across the fleet, a habit inherited from the Imperial Navy, which made curry a weekly staple to ward off beriberi; ships' galleys now compete over the best recipe.
Q 22What are the three basic vegetables in Japanese curry?
Onions, carrots and potatoes
Onions, carrots and potatoes simmer in a sauce made from blocks of instant roux; House Foods' apple-and-honey Vermont Curry of 1963 turned a spicy adult dish into a children's favourite.
Q 23In Japan, katsu curry refers exclusively to curry served with what?
A breaded, deep-fried cutlet
Q 14The word korma comes from a Hindi-Urdu term meaning what?
Braising
Braising is the technique the Hindi-Urdu word qorma names: meat is seared, then cooked slowly with yoghurt or stock and very little liquid; the word is Turkic in origin, kin to Turkish kavurma.
Q 15Which Cambodian curry is traditionally steamed in a banana-leaf cup?
Amok
Amok sets to a mousse as fish in kroeung paste and coconut cream steams in its banana-leaf cup; it is believed to have begun as a royal Khmer dish, and Cambodia now promotes it abroad.
Q 16Massaman curry is usually built on chicken, potatoes, onions and which nut?
Peanuts
Peanuts go in with the chicken and potatoes; massaman also stands out for cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, spices that reached Thailand with Muslim traders and are rare in other Thai curries.
Q 17The 'sweet' in kaeng khiao wan, the Thai name for green curry, describes what about the dish?
Its colour
Its colour: khiao wan means 'sweet green', the Thai term for a soft, creamy green. The curry is not necessarily sweeter than other Thai curries and tends to be hotter than red curry.
Q 18Which fresh rhizome, a pungent relative of ginger, is pounded into many Thai curry pastes?
Galangal
Galangal goes into the mortar with lemongrass, garlic and coriander root: Thai curries are built on fresh rhizomes, herbs and aromatic leaves, where Indian ones lean on mixes of dried spices.
Q 19Phanaeng (panang) curry is distinguished from other Thai curries by what?
A thick, creamy, mildly sweet sauce
A thick, creamy, mildly sweet sauce marks panang, cooked down in coconut cream with very little added liquid; older recipes were less sweet and grilled the meat before simmering it.
Q 20Who most likely introduced curry to Japan, where it first appeared in cookbooks in 1872?
The British Royal Navy
The British Royal Navy most likely brought it: Japan's navy was modelled on Britain's and took up its curry stew, though one naval researcher argues the military picked the dish up from civilian kitchens instead.
Katsu is short for katsuretsu (cutlet): katsu curry is curry served with a breaded, deep-fried cutlet, usually tonkatsu or chicken katsu; in Britain the name has drifted to mean the sauce.
Q 24Which is Japan's largest chain of curry restaurants?
CoCo Ichibanya
CoCo Ichibanya held about four-fifths of Japan's curry-shop market in 2014, plus a Guinness record for the most curry restaurants; House Foods, maker of Vermont Curry roux, later bought it.
Q 25The Madras curry of British menus takes its name from a city now called what?
Chennai
Madras was officially renamed Chennai in 1996; 'Madras curry' was invented in Anglo-Indian cooking as a simplified hot sauce made with curry powder, and the name is unknown in Indian cuisine.
Q 26The balti was developed in the 1970s in which English city, home to the 'Balti Triangle'?
Birmingham
Birmingham's balti is cooked fast over high heat and served in a thin pressed-steel bowl; a bid to win 'Birmingham Balti' EU protected status failed because no standard recipe could be defined.
Q 27Jalfrezi was created in Bengal during the Raj for what purpose?
To use up leftover meat by stir-frying
To use up leftover meat by stir-frying it with chillies and onions was the idea, recorded in Raj-era Anglo-Indian cookbooks; the dish is now a British curry-house favourite yet rare in restaurants in India.
Q 28Which dish traditionally sits at the top of a British curry-house heat scale?
Phall
Phall is the hottest curry regularly on the menu, a thick tomato-based sauce loaded with ground chillies; it was born in Britain's Bangladeshi-run curry houses, not in South Asia.
Q 29Which dish won CNN's 2011 reader vote for the world's most delicious food?
Rendang
Rendang, beef slow-cooked in coconut milk and spices until dry, drew a clear win from more than 35,000 reader votes, overturning the top pick on CNN's own list published earlier.
Q 30Which Delhi restaurant popularised butter chicken in the 1950s and is widely credited with inventing it?
Moti Mahal
Moti Mahal was opened in Daryaganj after Partition by refugees from Peshawar, credited with stirring leftover chicken into a buttery tomato gravy; a founder's grandson says they first made it back in Peshawar.