Halloween Food Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Halloween Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Halloween food trivia quiz is about everything that gets baked, boiled, dipped, carved and handed out at the door between the last week of October and the Day of the Dead. It starts with the medieval spiced cakes that gave the world door-to-door begging for treats, moves through the fortune-telling loaves and mashes of Ireland and Scotland, the toffee and treacle of British bonfire nights, and the apples that get bobbed for, candied and caramelised because the harvest has just come in. Then it heads to America for the pumpkin, from pie and roasted seeds to the giant that broke the world record, and to the candy aisle: the polarising three-colour classic and the company that makes most of it, the peanut-butter cup that dominates the season, and the breakfast-cereal monsters that return every autumn. There are questions on Mexican breads and sugar skulls, the overseas cousins of souling, and the numbers behind America's Halloween spending. Easy questions suit a party round; the harder ones on dates, names and origins will test any host. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia entries, and each question shows its explanation and source after you answer.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was candy corn called in its early days, when it was pitched at America's farm families?
Chicken Feed
Chicken Feed: about half of Americans still worked on farms, so the kernels were sold as a sweet that looked like the hens' dinner.
Q 02As of the mid-2020s, which company is the largest maker of candy corn?
Brach's
Brach's pushed single-serve packets of candy corn as trick-or-treating took off after the Second World War. Since a 2012 merger it has belonged to the Ferrara Candy Company.
Q 03Which wartime measure put American trick-or-treating largely on hold in the early 1940s?
Sugar rationing
Sugar rationing ran from 1942 to 1947 and left few treats to hand out. Once it ended, children's magazines and radio shows carried the custom nationwide.
Q 04Which company, renamed Jelly Belly in 2001, began making candy corn in 1898?
Goelitz Confectionery
Goelitz Confectionery was started by brothers newly arrived from Germany. It took its modern name from the Jelly Belly jelly beans it began making in 1976.
Q 05What are the spiced treats handed to door-to-door singers at Allhallowtide, ancestor of trick-or-treating, called?
Soul cakes
Soul cakes: the 'soulers' who received them promised to pray for the givers' dead relatives, and later the visitors were mostly children asking for food, money or ale.
Q 06In which country did children ask door to door for 'bread for God' at Allhallowtide?
Portugal
Portugal: Pão-por-Deus, 'bread for God', sees Portuguese children collect cakes, sweets and nuts door to door on All Saints' Day; the Philippines has a similar custom, Pangangaluwa.
Q 07What is the traditional Irish Halloween fruit bread with charms baked inside called?
Barmbrack
Barmbrack may take its name from the Irish bairín breac, 'speckled loaf', for the fruit that dots it, or from barm, the froth of fermenting ale once used as yeast.
Q 08In Ireland's Halloween fortune-telling loaf, what did finding a thimble foretell?
Staying unmarried
Staying unmarried: the thimble marked a future spinster or bachelor. Shop-bought loaves have since dropped it and the other charms, keeping only the ring.
Q 09Colcannon, an Irish dish served at Halloween, is mashed potato mixed with what?
Cabbage or kale
Cabbage or kale: the Irish name, cál ceannan, means 'white-headed cabbage'. A cheap year-round staple, it was dressed up for the Halloween feast with a pool of melted butter in the middle.
Q 10In Scotland, bobbing for apples is known by what name?
Dooking
Dooking is Scots for ducking. Players who would rather keep a dry face can hold a fork in their teeth and drop it to spear an apple instead.
Q 11Why do the apples float in the bobbing tub?
They are less dense than water
They are less dense than water: about a quarter of an apple's volume is air held in its flesh, which is why it bobs at the surface instead of sinking.
Q 12A Newark candy-maker is said to have invented the red candy apple in 1908 while testing a coating for which holiday?
Christmas
Christmas: as the story goes, William Kolb was trying out a red cinnamon candy for the festive trade, dipped a few apples in it for his shop window, and sold them at five cents each.
Q 13What is the Commonwealth English name for the whole fruit dipped in a hard red sugar coating on a stick?
Toffee apple
Q 21Which coffee chain launched the pumpkin spice latte nationally in autumn 2004?
Starbucks
Starbucks sold the drink for more than a decade with no pumpkin in it: real pumpkin only joined the recipe in 2015.
Q 22Most canned pumpkin in America is Dickinson pumpkin, which belongs to the same species as which squash?
Butternut
Butternut: both are Cucurbita moschata, and the Dickinson shares its cousin's sandy-tan skin, so it looks little like the round pumpkins carved for Halloween.
Q 23In old Halloween nut-burning divination, each pair of nuts on the fire stood for whom?
A courting couple
A courting couple: in Burns's 1785 poem 'Halloween', nuts named for two sweethearts are set on the fire; burning quietly side by side promises a happy match, spitting apart a stormy one.
Toffee apple is the name across Britain and Ireland, where the treat belongs to Halloween and Bonfire Night because both fall just after the apple harvest.
Q 14Botanically, what kind of fruit is a pumpkin?
A berry
A berry: botanists class pumpkins and other squashes as pepos, berries with a hard rind, which makes the pumpkin a fruit rather than a vegetable.
Q 15Candy apples stopped being handed out to trick-or-treaters largely because of rumours about what?
Razor blades hidden inside
Razor blades hidden inside: from the late 1960s reports of blades and pins in Halloween apples spread, though sociologist Joel Best found nearly all were hoaxes or caused only minor injury.
Q 16T'anta wawa, the 'bread babies' eaten with a thick purple drink on All Souls' Day, come from which mountain region?
The Andes
The Andes: families in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia shape the sweet loaves like babies, swap them with friends and godchildren, and carry them to the cemetery for their dead.
Q 17In Scotland, which sticky food is strung from the ceiling beside the apple-bobbing tub at Halloween?
Treacle scones
Treacle scones are smeared with extra treacle and strung up just out of reach, so players have to jump for a bite.
Q 18Before pumpkins, jack-o'-lanterns in Ireland and Britain were carved from which vegetable?
Turnips
Turnips were hollowed out, given faces and set in windows to scare off wandering spirits. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the custom to America and took up the native pumpkin instead.
Q 19Roasted pumpkin seeds are known by what Spanish-derived name?
Pepitas
Pepitas, from a Spanish word for a seed or pip, are toasted with salt as a snack in Mexico. Ground up, they thicken the mole known as pipián.
Q 20Pumpkin pie spice is generally a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and which other spice?
Cloves
Cloves round out the classic blend with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger; allspice is sometimes added, and the mix contains no pumpkin at all.
Q 24Pan de muerto, baked in Mexico for the Day of the Dead, is usually decorated with dough shaped like what?
Bones
Bones: crossed strips of dough stand for the bones of the dead, and the sugared loaf is one of the offerings set on the family altar for returning souls.
Q 25Alfeñique, a moulded sugar paste, is shaped into which famous Day of the Dead decorations in Mexico?
Skulls
Skulls: the calaveras are cast in moulds and decorated with coloured icing, and when one is bought as a gift the name of the person being remembered is often iced across its forehead.
Q 26Pan de muerto, Mexico's Day of the Dead bread, is often scented with anise and the zest of which fruit?
Orange
Orange, as zest or as orange-flower water, perfumes the dough. After baking, the loaf is coated in sugar, which some bakers dye pink or red.
Q 27Which company makes the 'monster cereals' that come back to shelves each Halloween season?
General Mills
General Mills launched the first two monsters in 1971. They sold all year until 2009 and have been an autumn-only treat since.
Q 28An early Franken Berry recipe had which alarming side effect in 1972?
It turned children's stool pink
It turned children's stool pink: the dye passed through the gut undigested, a 1972 Pediatrics paper named the harmless result 'Franken Berry stool', and the recipe was changed.
Q 29Which discontinued monster cereal turns up as a visual Easter egg in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs?
Fruit Brute
Fruit Brute, dropped by 1982, turns up in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It came back in 2013, respelled Frute Brute, after 31 years away.
Q 30Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were created in 1928 by a former employee of which chocolate magnate?
Milton S. Hershey
Milton S. Hershey: H. B. Reese ran one of his dairy barns until it was shut to save money, then set up on his own in the same town. In 1963 Reese's sons merged the firm into Hershey's.