Salad Trivia
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47 free Salad trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Caesar salad was invented in Mexico on the Fourth of July. Coleslaw is Dutch for cabbage salad, ranch dressing was born in Alaska, and the word salad itself comes from the Latin for salted, because Romans dressed their greens with brine. This salad trivia quiz covers the famous named salads and who really created them, the world's chopped and bread salads from tabbouleh to panzanella, dressings and croutons, lettuce from ancient Egypt to iceberg, and the salad bar. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'salad' ultimately derives from the Latin for what?
Salted
Salted is the root: classical cooks dressed raw greens with salt or brine, so 'salata', salted things, became 'salade' in French and 'sallet' in 14th-century English.
Q 02Which writer first recorded the phrase 'salad days', meaning youthful inexperience, in 1606?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare gave the phrase to Cleopatra, who looks back on her youthful affair with Julius Caesar: 'my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood'.
Q 03John Evelyn's 1699 Acetaria, often called the first book on salads, tried to get whom to eat fresh greens?
The Britons
The Britons got only a fragment of his plan: Evelyn, the diarist, worked for much of his life on a vast gardening encyclopedia he never finished, and published its salad chapter on its own.
Q 04In which city was the Caesar salad created in 1924?
Tijuana
Tijuana drew Americans dodging Prohibition, and restaurateur Caesar Cardini is said to have improvised the salad there when a Fourth of July rush emptied his kitchen.
Q 05Which lettuce is the traditional base of a Caesar salad?
Romaine
Romaine came whole in the original: the leaves were dressed uncut and meant to be lifted by the stem and eaten with the fingers.
Q 06Julia Child's Caesar recipe in the 1970s was based on an interview with whom?
Cardini's daughter Rosa
Cardini's daughter Rosa said her father tossed the ingredients in one at a time, and that his original used Worcestershire sauce, with no anchovies at all.
Q 07The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?
The Brown Derby
The Brown Derby's owner, Robert Cobb, is said to have thrown it together from kitchen leftovers for a midnight snack in 1937; a rival story credits his chef in 1929.
Q 08Which blue cheese is traditional in a Cobb salad?
Roquefort
Roquefort came at the second attempt: by his restaurant's own cookbook, the inventor first chopped an avocado with lettuce, tomato and bacon for his dinner, then tried again days later with chicken, egg and the cheese.
Q 09The original 1896 Waldorf salad had no walnuts: it was just mayonnaise, apples and which vegetable?
Celery
Celery, apples and mayonnaise were the whole recipe, created for a society charity event in New York; walnuts had been added by the time The Rector Cook Book printed the recipe in 1928.
Q 10Oscar Tschirky, credited with the Waldorf salad, was never a cook; what was his job?
Maître d'hôtel
Maître d'hôtel Tschirky ran the dining room, not the kitchen, yet in 1896 the man known as 'Oscar of the Waldorf' put his name to a large cookbook that carried the salad's recipe.
Q 11What distinguishes an authentic Greek horiatiki from most 'Greek salads' served abroad?
It contains no lettuce
It contains no lettuce, and its slab of feta is said to have begun as a dodge: Athens taverna owners added the cheese so that a price-capped tomato salad became a new dish they could price freely.
Q 12Jacques Médecin, mayor of Nice and salade niçoise purist, begged cooks 'never, never' to include which restaurant favourite?
Boiled potato
Boiled potato, or any other boiled vegetable, was banned from Médecin's 1972 recipe: he wanted the salad raw, mostly tomatoes, served in a wooden bowl rubbed with garlic.
Q 13Which three ingredients make up a Caprese salad?
Q 21Salat katzutz, a finely diced salad of cucumber, onion and peppers, accompanies most meals in which country?
Israel
Israel's 'chopped salad' was adopted by Jewish immigrants from the local Arab kitchen in the late 19th century and spread through the kibbutzim, which had fresh produce at hand.
Q 22Lettuce belongs to the same plant family as which of these?
Sunflowers
Sunflowers, daisies and dandelions all share lettuce's family, the asters; its Latin name, Lactuca, comes from the milky sap that oozes from a cut stem.
Q 23Which ancient civilisation left the earliest known pictures of lettuce, grown then for its seed oil?
Egyptians
Egyptians pressed the seeds for oil and held the plant sacred to the fertility god Min: priests carried lettuces at his festival, which is why it appears in so much tomb and temple art.
Tomato, mozzarella, basil
Tomato, mozzarella, basil: red, white and green, which one account calls a patriotic homage to the Italian flag, on a salad named for the island of Capri.
Q 14The word 'coleslaw' is an 18th-century anglicisation of a term from which language?
Dutch
Dutch koolsla simply means 'cabbage salad'; English borrowed it in the late 18th century, probably from Dutch settlers in America, and at first tamed it to 'cold slaw'.
Q 15Austrian and south German potato salad is traditionally dressed with what, and served warm?
Oil and vinegar
Oil and vinegar also dressed the first American potato salads: the mid-19th-century recipes arrived with German settlers, while north Germans serve theirs cold with mayonnaise.
Q 16Tabbouleh is a Levantine salad built around soaked bulgur and which herb?
Parsley
Parsley is the point: in Lebanon and Syria the salad is mostly chopped herb with a little bulgur, while Western versions often reverse the proportions.
Q 17Fattoush gets its crunch from toasted or fried pieces of what?
Pita bread
Pita bread gone stale is the reason the dish exists: fattoush belongs to a family of Levantine dishes built on leftover flatbread, sharpened here with sour sumac.
Q 18Panzanella, the summer bread salad, comes from which region of Italy?
Tuscany
Tuscany's bread salad may have begun without tomatoes: a 16th-century poem by the painter Bronzino, often read as an early description of it, praises bread eaten with a salad of chopped onion and cucumber.
Q 19Olivier salad, a Russian New Year staple, was invented in the 1860s by the chef of which Moscow restaurant?
The Hermitage
The Hermitage's chef, Lucien Olivier, mixed his dressing alone; a sous-chef who spied on him could only manage a lesser copy, sold elsewhere as 'Stolichny' salad.
Q 20Gado-gado, an Indonesian salad of vegetables, egg, tofu and tempeh, is served with which sauce?
Peanut
Peanut sauce dresses one of Indonesia's five official national dishes: the tourism ministry named them in 2018 to give the country's cooking a short list to promote to foreign visitors.
Q 24Which country grew more than half the world's lettuce in 2023?
China
China grew 53 percent of the 28 million tonnes of lettuce and chicory harvested worldwide in 2023, in a market that Europe and North America dominated until late last century.
Q 25Iceberg lettuce was created in 1894 by which American seed company?
Burpee
Burpee's 1894 catalogue boasted 'there is no handsomer or more solid cabbage lettuce in cultivation'; the name is usually put down to the crushed ice the heads were packed on.
Q 26British cooks call the long-leaved Caesar-salad lettuce by a name most dictionaries trace to which Greek island?
Kos
Kos is the island dictionaries point to, on the theory that the lettuce was introduced from there; other authorities derive 'cos' from khus, an Arabic word for lettuce.
Q 27Arugula, or rocket, belongs to the same plant family as which vegetable?
Cabbage
Cabbage and arugula both belong to the mustard family, which is why the leaf, native to the Mediterranean, has such a peppery bite.
Q 28Kale is a leafy form of the very same species as which of these vegetables?
Broccoli
Broccoli, kale, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are all one species, Brassica oleracea, bred over centuries for different parts: leaves, flower heads or buds.
Q 29Ranch dressing was first concocted in the early 1950s by a plumbing contractor working where?
Alaska
Alaska is where Steve Henson mixed it to feed his plumbing crews; he later bought a guest ranch in California, named it Hidden Valley and served the dressing to visitors.
Q 30Ranch became America's best-selling salad dressing in 1992 by overtaking which rival?
Italian
Italian dressing was overtaken by a newcomer named for the Hidden Valley guest ranch: it sold as a dry mix to stir up at home until a bottled version that kept on the shelf arrived in the 1980s and sales climbed.