Green Beans
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40 free Green Beans trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Green beans look like the most ordinary thing on the plate, yet they carry more stories than most vegetables. They crossed an ocean to reach European gardens, gave their name to something astronomers study, and star in a casserole that millions of American families bake every year. This quiz turns those stories into fun facts you can play. It covers the plant itself (where it comes from, how it grows and why it should not be eaten raw), the many names and varieties found in shops and seed catalogues, the history of the famous casserole, and green bean dishes from Europe, Asia and the American South. It suits a food-themed quiz night, a gardening club, a classroom lesson on plants, or a holiday table waiting for dinner. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a few facts worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Peixinhos da horta, Portugal's green beans in a crisp batter, are credited as the ancestor of which Japanese dish?
Tempura
Tempura grew out of the fritters that Portuguese sailors and missionaries carried to Japan in the 1500s. The Portuguese name means little fish from the garden, after the shape of the battered pods.
Q 02Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in the test kitchen of which American food company?
Campbell's
Campbell's home economist Dorcas Reilly devised it as a quick dish from ingredients most households already had. She went on to run the company's home economics department.
Q 03Astronomers use the nickname 'green bean' for a rare type of which object, thought to be lit by a fading quasar?
Galaxy
A galaxy of this kind glows green throughout, which astronomers think is the afterglow of a quasar that has since dimmed. The name nods to the similar but smaller Green Pea galaxies.
Q 04Some varieties of green bean turn green only when cooked, starting out with raw pods of which colour?
Purple
Purple pods such as Royal Burgundy and Trionfo Violetto fade to ordinary green as they cook, so the colour never reaches the plate.
Q 05Which country grows roughly seven of every ten tonnes of the world's green beans?
China
China accounted for 72% of the 26 million tonnes of green beans grown worldwide in 2024, a crop sold fresh, canned and frozen.
Q 06To a botanist, the green bean pods served as a vegetable are really which part of the plant?
Fruit
Fruit is the botanical term, because each pod encloses the plant's seeds. Green beans are simply picked young, before the beans inside have matured.
Q 07Raw green beans carry a natural toxin found at far higher levels in which bean, a staple of chili con carne?
Kidney
Kidney beans hold so much of the toxin that as few as four or five raw ones can make a person ill. Thorough boiling destroys it, which is why green beans should not be eaten raw either.
Q 08Green bean casserole is served at an estimated 20 million American dinners on which annual holiday?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is the casserole's big day, and it has been called an iconic side dish of the meal. It began as an everyday side and became a holiday fixture in the 1960s, once the recipe was printed on can labels.
Q 09The tough fibre that once ran the length of every pod earned green beans the name of which kind of bean?
String
String beans kept the name even after Calvin Keeney bred the first variety without the fibre in 1894. Most modern green beans have none at all.
Q 10Leaves of the green bean plant, covered in microscopic hairs, were once used in houses to trap which biting pest?
Bedbugs
Bedbugs become entangled in the tiny hairs, called trichomes, and cannot escape. Engineers have studied the leaves as a model for man-made surfaces that trap the insects.
Q 11Which canned soup, first sold by its maker in 1934, forms the creamy sauce of green bean casserole?
Cream of mushroom
Cream of mushroom was the first of its maker's soups to be marketed as a sauce as well as a soup. By the company's own estimate, about 40% of it ends up in this one dish.
Q 12Which crunchy topping, praised by one food historian as the recipe's masterstroke, finishes a green bean casserole?
Fried onions
Fried onions are stirred into the mix and then scattered on top for the last few minutes in the oven. Historian Laura Shapiro credited them with giving a plain convenience dish some glamour.
Q 13In the Three Sisters planting of Native American farmers, climbing beans grow alongside corn and which crop?
Squash
Q 21The yardlong bean, a long-podded Asian cousin of the green bean, is also named after which other green vegetable?
Asparagus
Asparagus bean is the plant's other widely used name, alongside snake bean and long bean. Despite the yardlong label, its pods usually stop at about half a yard.
Q 22Green beans are the unripe pods of which species, the same plant that yields pinto, navy and black beans?
Common bean
Common bean is the everyday name for Phaseolus vulgaris, first farmed some 8,000 years ago. Whether it reaches the shop as a pod or a dried bean depends on the variety and when it is picked.
Q 23Fasolakia, a dish of green beans simmered in olive oil, belongs to the ladera cooking of which country?
Greece
Squash sprawls between the mounds, its broad leaves shading the soil and holding back weeds. The corn gives the beans a stalk to climb, and the beans steady the corn in high winds.
Q 14Bacteria living in the root nodules of green bean plants pull which gas from the air, enriching the soil?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen fixed in the nodules feeds the plant, and some of it stays behind for whatever is sown next. That is why beans have long had a place in crop rotation.
Q 15Green beans belong to which plant family, whose members also include peanuts, lentils and soybeans?
Legumes
Legumes make up the third-largest family of land plants, with about 19,000 known species. Only the orchid and daisy families are bigger.
Q 16Green beans come as low 'bush' types and as climbing vines named after which support they are grown on?
Pole
Pole beans send up twisting vines that need something to climb. Farms mostly grow the low kind instead, because it ripens over a short spell and suits machine harvesting.
Q 17Yellow-podded green beans, often tossed into an American three-bean salad, are sold as which kind of bean?
Wax
Wax beans are green beans in all but colour, and most kinds grow as low bushes rather than climbing vines. Golden Wax and Rocquencourt are two of the named varieties.
Q 18Which French salad of tomatoes, olives and anchovies often gains cooked green beans, to the dismay of purists?
Niçoise
Niçoise purists such as Jacques Médecin, a former mayor of Nice, insisted that no boiled vegetable belonged in the salad. Cooks around the world add green beans and potatoes anyway.
Q 19Dilly beans, a jarred snack flavoured with garlic and red pepper, are green beans preserved by which method?
Pickling
Pickling with dill, the herb behind the name, turns a glut of green beans into a snack that keeps. Dilly beans went on sale commercially in 1958, backed by a well-known radio campaign.
Q 20Before freezing, green beans are briefly boiled and then plunged into an ice bath in which kitchen technique?
Blanching
Blanching switches off the enzymes that would otherwise spoil the colour, flavour and texture of stored vegetables. The cold plunge that halts the cooking is known as shocking.
Greece gives the name ladera, literally 'oily', to vegetable dishes cooked this way. Okra, peas and leeks get the same treatment.
Q 24Home-canned green beans, a low-acid food, must be processed under pressure to prevent which rare, paralysing illness?
Botulism
Botulism has most often been traced to home-canned, low-acid foods such as green beans, beets and corn. A pressure canner reaches 240°F, far hotter than an open boiling pot.
Q 25Green beans are a moderate source of which nutrient, the one the body needs for blood to clot?
Vitamin K
Vitamin K takes its letter from Koagulation, as coagulation is spelled in Danish and German. Without it, clotting is badly impaired and bleeding becomes hard to stop.
Q 26Scarlet runner beans, popular in British kitchen gardens, are also grown as ornamentals for which red feature?
Flowers
Flowers of bright red earned the plant a place in ornamental gardens as well as vegetable plots. In Britain the blooms came to be treated as a bonus to the crop of pods.
Q 27Which Midwestern state leads the United States in growing green beans for canning and freezing?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin also ranks first for cranberries and ginseng, growing more than half of the national cranberry crop. Growers call the processing crop snap beans.
Q 28The original recipe card for green bean casserole was donated in 2002 to which American hall of fame?
National Inventors
The National Inventors Hall of Fame received it from Dorcas Reilly, the home economist who wrote the recipe. She became known as the grandmother of the green bean bake.
Q 29Raw green beans are roughly nine-tenths which substance, leaving room for only 31 calories per 100 grams?
Water
Water makes up about 90% of a raw green bean. Carbohydrates account for roughly 7% and protein 2%, with almost no fat.
Q 30In Appalachian cooking, 'leather britches' are green beans preserved for winter by which old method?
Drying on a thread
Drying on a thread, usually behind a wood stove, shrivels the pods until they look like tiny leather trousers. The dish is also known as shucky beans.