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99 free Hard Potato trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This is the hard potato trivia quiz. If you already know potatoes come from the Andes, that they belong to the nightshade family and that George Crum probably did not invent the chip, these 99 questions go deeper: the 1567 shipping receipt that is the first written mention of a potato, the freeze-dried Inca ration that may have powered an empire, the Mexican valley where blight was born, the Prussian king nicknamed the Potato King, and the pharmacist who posted armed guards around his potato patch by day and removed them at night. The set covers domestication and botany, the crop's slow conquest of Europe, the Great Famine and its aftermath, the breeders behind Russet Burbank, Maris Piper, Yukon Gold and King Edward, and the industrial afterlife of the tuber in chips, crisps, fries, tots, Pringles and Mr. Potato Head, with a detour through Van Gogh and Swiss politics. It is written for people who have read Salaman. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopedic source before publishing and each question carries its citation. For a warm-up, start with our main potato trivia quiz and come back for this one.
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Q 01The first written mention of the potato is a 1567 delivery receipt from the Canary Islands to which port?
Antwerp
The earliest known written record of the potato is a 1567 receipt for a shipment from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to Antwerp; a 1574 shipment from Tenerife reached Rouen.
Q 02The Taíno word batata, source of the English word via Spanish patata, originally meant which crop?
The sweet potato
The two crops are unrelated: the sweet potato belongs to the morning glory family, while the potato is a nightshade.
Q 03The cultivated potato Solanum tuberosum is a tetraploid with how many chromosomes?
48
Solanum tuberosum has 48 chromosomes, four sets of the base number 12; diploid relatives such as S. phureja have 24 and the pentaploid S. curtilobum has 60.
Q 04Potatoes were first domesticated in the highlands around which South American lake?
Titicaca
Potatoes were domesticated near Lake Titicaca on the Peru-Bolivia altiplano some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, from wild species of the Solanum brevicaule complex.
Q 05Chuño, the Andean freeze-dried potato, is made by leaving potatoes out for three nights at what temperature?
Around minus 5 °C
Chuño is made at around minus 5 °C: June and July nights on the altiplano above 3,800 metres freeze the tubers, and the daytime sun then dries them over several days.
Q 06White chuño, made by washing the frozen potatoes for about a week, is known in Bolivia by what name?
Tunta
White chuño is called tunta in Bolivia and moraya in Peru; the frozen tubers are soaked in river pools for about a week and then sun-dried, giving the pale product.
Q 07North America's earliest certain potato crop was planted in New Hampshire in 1719 by settlers from which town?
Derry
The settlers were Ulster Scots from Derry (Londonderry) who founded Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1719; their planting is the earliest well-documented potato crop in North America, hence 'Irish potato'.
Q 08Which monarch's 1756 Potato Edict ordered peasants to grow the crop?
Frederick the Great of Prussia
Frederick the Great of Prussia issued the Kartoffelbefehl on 24 March 1756 ordering the crop planted; legend says he posted guards on fields so peasants would covet the potatoes.
Q 09Where did Parmentier guard his potato patch by day and leave it open at night so people would steal from it?
Sablons, near Paris
Parmentier's 1786 field lay at Sablons, near Paris, on the Plaine des Sablons at Neuilly, granted by Louis XVI; guards by day and none at night tempted locals to steal the tubers.
Q 10Which two famous guests attended Parmentier's potato-themed dinners in Paris?
Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier
Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier dined at Parmentier's 1780s potato dinners, where every course was built on the tuber; Franklin was then the American envoy in Paris.
Q 11In which year did the Paris Faculty of Medicine finally declare potatoes edible?
1772
The Paris Faculty of Medicine declared potatoes edible in 1772, largely through Parmentier's advocacy; resistance persisted, and the religious order that owned the Invalides land later closed his test garden there.
Q 12By approximately what factor did France's annual potato crop grow between 1815 and 1840?
Fivefold
The crop grew roughly fivefold, from about 21 million hectolitres in 1815 to 117 million in 1840, as the potato moved from gardens into field rotations across France.
Q 13In early modern Europe, the potato yielded roughly how many times the calories per acre of grain?
3
Potatoes yielded roughly 3 times the calories per acre of grain crops and tolerated poorer soils and wetter climates, which is why the tuber displaced bread among Europe's rural poor.
Q 21Which city gave the first large foreign donation to Irish famine relief in 1846, about £14,000?
Calcutta
Calcutta's Irish Relief Fund raised about £14,000 in 1846, largely from Irish soldiers and East India Company employees; Queen Victoria personally gave £2,000 and Pope Pius IX also sent money.
Q 22Which South American potato did Chauncey Goodrich import, starting the Russet Burbank lineage?
Rough Purple Chili
Rough Purple Chili, obtained by Goodrich from Panama in 1851, gave rise to his Garnet Chili; Albert Bresee bred Early Rose from that, and Luther Burbank selected his seedling from Early Rose in the early 1870s.
Q 23At which Canadian institution was the Yukon Gold potato developed?
Guelph
Q 14A 2014 study concluded that the late-blight organism Phytophthora infestans originated in which country's highlands?
Mexico
The A2 mating type stayed confined to Mexico's Toluca Valley until the 1970s. Only in Mexico and Scandinavia do the two mating types regularly form winter-hardy oospores.
Q 15Who discovered the A2 mating type of potato blight in the Toluca Valley in the 1950s?
John Niederhauser
John Niederhauser, working for the Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Agricultural Program, found the A2 mating type in Mexico's Toluca Valley in the 1950s; he won the 1990 World Food Prize.
Q 16Which wild hexaploid potato species has been the main source of late-blight resistance in modern breeding?
Solanum demissum
Solanum demissum, a hexaploid wild potato of the Mexican highlands, supplied the R1 to R11 late-blight resistance genes that breeders crossed into cultivated potatoes through the twentieth century.
Q 17Which waxy Irish potato variety's vulnerability to blight is blamed for the scale of the 1840s famine?
The Lumper
The Lumper, a waxy, high-yielding but watery variety, dominated Irish smallholdings, so when Phytophthora infestans arrived in 1845 there was almost no genetic diversity to slow its spread.
Q 18Which Native American nation sent $170 for Irish famine relief in 1847, honoured by the sculpture Kindred Spirits?
The Choctaw
The Choctaw sent $170 in 1847, only sixteen years after their own forced removal on the Trail of Tears; Alex Pentek's Kindred Spirits, nine steel eagle feathers, stands in Midleton, County Cork.
Q 19Roughly what share of the Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847 died of disease and malnutrition?
One in five
About one in five of the roughly 100,000 Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847 died at sea or soon after landing; more than 5,000 are buried at the Grosse Île quarantine station on the St Lawrence.
Q 20Which Treasury official running Irish famine relief said small farmers leaving could bring a 'satisfactory settlement'?
Charles Trevelyan
Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, ran relief on laissez-faire lines, limiting food aid so public-works wages would draw imports; the government abandoned that policy in January 1847 and opened soup kitchens.
Gary Johnston bred Yukon Gold at the University of Guelph in Ontario, making the cross in 1966 with Agriculture Canada; the yellow-fleshed variety was released in 1980.
Q 24Maris Piper, released in 1966, was one of the first potatoes bred to resist which pest?
Cyst nematode
Maris Piper carries the H1 gene for resistance to the potato cyst nematode, found by Conrad Ellenby in an Andean potato; Harold Howard's Plant Breeding Institute team in Cambridge released the variety in 1966.
Q 25The King Edward potato of 1902 was originally bred by a Northumberland gardener under what name?
Fellside Hero
The variety was raised in Northumberland as Fellside Hero; Lincolnshire grower John Butler bought it and renamed it King Edward to mark Edward VII's 1902 coronation, reputedly with Buckingham Palace's permission.
Q 26Jersey Royals trace to about 1878, when Hugh de la Haye planted a large potato with how many eyes?
15
De la Haye cut a potato with 15 eyes into pieces and planted them; one plant yielded the kidney-shaped tubers dubbed the Jersey Royal Fluke, the International Kidney variety that holds a Protected Designation of Origin.
Q 27BASF's genetically modified Amflora potato was engineered to produce starch made almost entirely of what?
Amylopectin
Amflora's starch is almost pure amylopectin: antisense RNA silences granule-bound starch synthase, the enzyme that makes amylose, yielding a starch prized for paper and adhesives; the EU approved it in 2010.
Q 28In which Oregon town near the Idaho border was Ore-Ida founded in 1949?
Ontario
Brothers Nephi and Golden Grigg rented a frozen-food plant in Ontario, Oregon, in 1949 and turned it to potatoes; the Ore-Ida name joins Oregon and Idaho, whose border runs beside the town.
Q 29Solanine, the potato's natural toxin, was first isolated in 1820 from the berries of which plant?
European black nightshade
Solanine was first isolated in 1820 by Desfosses from the berries of the European black nightshade, Solanum nigrum, and was named after the genus; toxic doses are about 2 to 5 mg per kilogram of body weight.
Q 30Which 1817 London bestseller has the earliest known recipe for potato chips?
The Cook's Oracle
William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle, published in London in 1817, gives the earliest known recipe, 'potatoes fried in slices or shavings', decades before the 1853 Saratoga Springs legend of George Crum.