Christmas Food Around the World
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166 free Christmas Food Around the World trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
56 free Christmas Food Around the World trivia questions with answers. From Italian panettone to Japanese fried chicken, Christmas food traditions span the globe with surprising variety. This quiz takes you on a culinary tour of holiday feasts, festive desserts, and seasonal drinks from dozens of countries. How well do you know the world's Christmas table?
30 of 166 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which corn-dough parcel wrapped in plantain leaves and filled with meat stew is Venezuela's Christmas dish?
Hallaca
The hallaca is Venezuela's Christmas dish: corn dough around a stew of beef, pork and chicken with raisins, olives and capers, folded in plantain leaves, tied with string and boiled.
Q 02What Italian city is considered the birthplace of panettone?
Milan
Milan is panettone's home, yet the tall, soft dome known today dates only from 1919, when Angelo Motta's bakery there began turning out the modern loaf.
Q 03What is France's traditional Christmas dessert?
Bûche de Noël
The Bûche de Noël (Yule Log cake) is a traditional French Christmas dessert made from rolled sponge cake decorated to look like a log, referencing the old custom of burning a Yule log.
Q 04Eggnog is believed to descend from which medieval English drink of hot curdled milk?
Posset
Posset was taken as a cold remedy and a nightcap: in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth drugs the guards' possets so that they sleep through King Duncan's murder.
Q 05Which German city is most famous for its Christmas stollen, holding an annual festival in its honor?
Dresden
Dresden's Stollenfest parades a giant stollen weighing tonnes through the streets to the Christmas market each Advent, where it is cut up and sold in portions for charity.
Q 06What fairy tale is credited with popularizing the tradition of building gingerbread houses?
Hansel and Gretel
Hansel and Gretel inspired German bakers' decorated houses in the early 1800s, yet the Grimms' witch lives in a house built of bread, roofed with cake and windowed with clear sugar.
Q 07What is traditionally hidden inside a British Christmas pudding for good luck?
A coin
A coin, usually a silver sixpence or threepence, went into the mix; whoever found it in their helping kept it and was promised wealth in the year ahead.
Q 08Germany's finest gingerbread, Elisenlebkuchen, may contain at most 10 percent of which baking staple?
Flour
Flour is capped at 10 percent in Elisenlebkuchen while nuts must make up at least a quarter, so the soft, sticky dough is piped onto thin wafers to bake.
Q 09During Las Posadas, the meal after the piñata usually includes atole, buñuelos and which dish?
Tamales
Tamales round off each posada, the nightly processions that re-enact Mary and Joseph's search for an inn, washed down with ponche, a hot punch of fruits such as tejocote and guava.
Q 10Stir-up Sunday, when Christmas puddings are traditionally mixed about five weeks ahead, falls on which day?
Last Sunday before Advent
Stir-up Sunday falls on the last Sunday before Advent. The name comes from the Book of Common Prayer collect for that day, which begins "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord."
Q 11What hot spiced drink is the signature of Christmas markets across Germany and Austria?
Mulled wine
Mulled wine, sold there as Glühwein, is red wine heated with cinnamon, cloves and citrus; for Feuerzangenbowle a spirit-soaked sugarloaf is set alight above the pot and drips in.
Q 12Where do many Polish families keep a live Christmas carp for a few days before cooking it?
In the bathtub
In the bathtub: the carp is bought alive and swims there for a few days, a habit said to rinse away its muddy taste before the Christmas Eve supper.
Q 13A 15th-century papal letter freed German bakers to put which fast-forbidden ingredient in their Advent stollen?
Butter
Q 21Which cold dish, brought by Italian immigrants, is a fixture of Argentina's Christmas table?
Vitel toné
Vitel toné, cold veal in tuna sauce, is Piedmont's vitello tonnato under its dialect name; served chilled as a starter, it suits a Christmas and New Year that fall in the southern summer.
Q 22Torrone, Italy's Christmas nougat, is a speciality of which Lombardy city, also home to Stradivari's violins?
Cremona
Cremona's legend has torrone first served at the 1441 wedding of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, moulded like the Torrazzo bell tower.
Q 23Which vegetable, loved by some diners and loathed by others, is a fixture of the British Christmas dinner?
Brussels sprouts
Butter was banned during the Advent fast, leaving stollen a plain, hard loaf, until Pope Innocent VIII's 'Butter Letter' lifted the rule; an earlier pope had refused the same plea.
Q 14Which roast is the centrepiece of most British Christmas dinners today?
Roast turkey
Roast turkey was already on English Christmas tables by 1573, when farmer-poet Thomas Tusser listed it among the season's fare; before it spread, goose or roast beef was the usual centrepiece.
Q 15What small sausages wrapped in bacon are a staple side dish at a British Christmas dinner?
Pigs in blankets
Pigs in blankets are chipolatas wrapped in streaky bacon in Britain; ask for them in the United States and the 'blanket' is bread or pastry dough instead.
Q 16What is the name of the traditional Filipino whole roasted pig served at Christmas celebrations?
Lechon
Lechon is roasted whole over charcoal, often stuffed with lemongrass and tamarind leaves; the Spanish word means a suckling piglet, but in the Philippines it now covers any roast pig.
Q 17What Italian Christmas cake from Verona is traditionally star-shaped and dusted with powdered sugar?
Pandoro
Pandoro's coat of icing sugar is meant to make the tall, star-shaped loaf look like a snowy mountain peak; Verona confectioner Domenico Melegatti patented the recipe in 1894.
Q 18Which fruit at the bottom of a Christmas stocking is said to stand for St Nicholas's gift of gold?
An orange
An orange, or a tangerine or satsuma, recalls the legend of St Nicholas secretly leaving gold for a poor family, gold that some tellings turn into three golden balls.
Q 19What is the Nordic name for the spiced hot wine, of Swedish origin, drunk around Christmas?
Glögg
Glögg takes its name from Swedish glödga, to heat, a verb built on glöd, 'ember'; it is served with raisins and blanched almonds in the cup.
Q 20Which flavour is traditional for a red-and-white striped candy cane?
Peppermint
Peppermint is the classic flavour; canes were bent by hand, with heavy breakage, until a priest, Gregory Keller, built a machine for his brother-in-law's Georgia candy firm in the 1950s.
Brussels sprouts divide the table, and an old kitchen habit may not help: the cross cut into each base, meant to help them cook evenly, is said to leave them waterlogged.
Q 24What is the name of the Greek Christmas bread decorated with a cross on top?
Christopsomo
Christopsomo means "Christ's bread". Some of the dough is set aside to form the cross on top; its Easter cousin lampropsomo has dyed whole eggs pressed into the braid.
Q 25What is the traditional Christmas dessert in Australia, reflecting the country's summer holiday season?
Pavlova
Pavlova, meringue under whipped cream and summer fruit, was named for ballerina Anna Pavlova after her 1920s tours, and Australia and New Zealand still dispute who made it first.
Q 26A popular origin story says candy canes began in 1670 with the choirmaster of which cathedral?
Cologne
Cologne Cathedral's choirmaster, the legend goes, had sugar sticks bent into shepherds' crooks in 1670 to keep children quiet through the Nativity service; no record from the time backs the story.
Q 27Which Polish city, birthplace of Copernicus, is famous for its pierniki gingerbread?
Toruń
Toruń has baked its honey-and-spice pierniki since the Middle Ages; the teenage Chopin stopped there in the 1820s and praised the gingerbread in a letter.
Q 28The French Christmas Eve dinner 'réveillon' survives in which US city's restaurants?
New Orleans
New Orleans keeps the réveillon alive; the name comes from the French réveiller, 'to wake', because the long meal keeps diners up well past midnight.
Q 29Norway's Christmas dish pinnekjøtt is made from which cured and dried meat?
Lamb ribs
Pinnekjøtt is lamb ribs, salted and dried (sometimes smoked), then soaked and steamed over birch sticks, served with mashed rutabaga and akevitt; it is the Christmas main across western Norway.
Q 30What spongy sourdough flatbread is torn off to scoop up the stews of an Ethiopian Christmas feast?
Injera
Injera is plate and spoon at once: the Ganna feast's spicy stew is ladled onto the flatbread, and diners tear off pieces to scoop it up.