100 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 100 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.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The first written mention of the potato is a 1567 delivery receipt from the Canary Islands to which port?
Antwerp
The Canaries were the first place outside Central and South America where potatoes were grown. Spain took up the crop around 1570 and the British Isles between 1588 and 1593.
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
Diploid relatives such as S. phureja have 24, triploids 36 and the pentaploid S. curtilobum 60. A 2025 study grouped every domesticated potato under S. tuberosum.
Q 04Potatoes were first domesticated around which lake on the Peru-Bolivia border?
Titicaca
Domestication happened 7,000 to 10,000 years ago from a species in the S. brevicaule complex. Wild potatoes range from the southern US to southern Chile.
Q 05Chuño, the Andean freeze-dried potato, is made by leaving potatoes out for three nights at what temperature?
Around minus 5 °C
The June and July nights above 3,800 metres freeze the tubers and the daytime sun dries them. Carl Troll argued this natural freeze-drying helped the Inca Empire rise.
Q 06White chuño, made by washing the frozen potatoes for about a week, is known in Bolivia by what name?
Tunta
In Peru the frozen potatoes are carried to a river and left in pools. Chuño was eaten by Inca soldiers on the march and described by José de Acosta in 1590.
Q 07Which Spanish chronicler wrote that his 1537 Colombian expedition found 'a type of truffle' in Chibcha homes?
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada
Cieza de León mentioned seeing potatoes in Quito, Popayán and Pasto in his 1553 Crónica del Perú. Spaniards long regarded the tuber as food for natives.
Q 08North America's earliest certain potato crop was planted in New Hampshire in 1719 by settlers from which town?
Derry
Because the plants came from Ireland the crop became known as the 'Irish potato'. Jefferson insisted the plant was not native to North America.
Q 09Which monarch's 1756 Potato Edict ordered peasants to grow the crop and earned the nickname Kartoffelkönig?
Frederick the Great of Prussia
The proclamation called the tuber 'a very nutritious food supplement'. Legend says he too posted guards on potato fields to make peasants covet them.
Q 10Where did Parmentier guard his potato patch by day and leave it open at night so people would steal from it?
Sablons, near Paris
He also gave potato blossoms to the king and queen and hosted potato dinners for Benjamin Franklin and Lavoisier. He is buried at Père Lachaise in a plot ringed by potato plants.
Q 11Which two famous guests attended Parmentier's potato-themed dinners in Paris?
Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier
The Paris Faculty of Medicine had recently declared potatoes edible, largely thanks to him. Napoleon later made him the first army pharmacist.
Q 12In which year did the Paris Faculty of Medicine finally declare potatoes edible?
1772
Resistance continued: the religious community that owned the land stopped Parmentier using his test garden at the Invalides, and his post there was suppressed.
Q 13By approximately what factor did France's annual potato crop grow between 1815 and 1840?
Fivefold
Q 21Which Treasury official running Irish famine relief said small farmers leaving could bring a 'satisfactory settlement'?
Charles Trevelyan
He limited food aid on the theory that wages from public works would draw imports. The government abandoned non-interference in January 1847.
Q 22Which city gave the first large foreign donation to Irish famine relief in 1846, about £14,000?
Calcutta
Irish soldiers and East India Company employees contributed. Tsar Alexander II sent funds and Queen Victoria gave £2,000.
Q 23Which South American potato did Chauncey Goodrich import in 1853, starting the Russet Burbank lineage?
Rough Purple Chili
It went from 21 million hectolitres to 117 million. The 1785 Bon Jardinier had sniffed that 'the poor should be quite content with this foodstuff'.
Q 14In early modern Europe, the potato yielded roughly how many times the calories per acre of grain?
3
It also grew in a wider range of soils and climates. Ireland was probably the first part of Europe to cultivate it on a wide scale, in the early 17th century.
Q 15A 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 16Who discovered the A2 mating type of potato blight in the Toluca Valley in the 1950s?
John Niederhauser
He was working for the Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Agriculture Program and published the find in 1956.
Q 17Which wild hexaploid potato species has been the main source of late-blight resistance in modern breeding?
Solanum demissum
S. fendleri, a wild North American species, is used against nematodes instead.
Q 18Which waxy Irish potato variety's vulnerability to blight is blamed for the scale of the 1840s famine?
The Lumper
By 1841 Ireland had just over eight million people, most of them tenant farmers forced into potato monoculture on tiny plots.
Q 19Which Native American nation sent $170 for Irish famine relief in 1847, honoured by the sculpture Kindred Spirits?
The Choctaw
The gift came barely a decade after their own forced removal. Alex Pentek's steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers stands in Midleton.
Q 20Roughly what share of the Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847 died of disease and malnutrition?
One in five
Over 5,000 died at the Grosse Isle quarantine station in the St Lawrence. Ireland's National Famine Memorial in Mayo depicts a coffin ship with skeletons in the rigging.
Goodrich bred Garnet Chili from it, Albert Bresee bred Early Rose from that, and Luther Burbank selected his seedling from Early Rose in 1873.
Q 24At which Canadian institution was the Yukon Gold potato developed?
Guelph
Gary Johnston made the official cross in 1966 and the variety reached market in 1980, nearly 30 years after work began.
Q 25Maris Piper, Britain's most-grown potato, was one of the first varieties bred to resist which pest?
Cyst nematode
Conrad Ellenby had screened over 60 wild species from 1941 to find resistance; H. W. Howard's Cambridge team made the final cross in 1956 and released it in 1966.
Q 26The King Edward potato of 1902 was originally bred by a Northumberland gardener under what name?
Fellside Hero
Lincolnshire grower John Butler renamed it to mark Edward VII's coronation, reputedly with permission from Buckingham Palace.
Q 27Jersey Royals trace to about 1878, when Hugh de la Haye planted a large potato with how many eyes?
15
One plant gave kidney-shaped, thin-skinned tubers dubbed the Jersey Royal Fluke. The variety is really International Kidney and holds an EU Protected Designation of Origin.
Q 28BASF's genetically modified Amflora potato was engineered to produce starch made almost entirely of what?
Amylopectin
Antisense RNA switches off the enzyme that builds amylose, giving an industrially useful starch. Waxy varieties do something similar naturally.
Q 29In which Oregon town near the Idaho border was Ore-Ida founded in 1949?
Ontario
The Grigg brothers rented a frozen-food plant there and turned it to potato processing, buying it outright around 1952 after a foreclosure.
Q 30Solanine, the potato's natural toxin, was first isolated in 1820 from the berries of which plant?
European black nightshade
One study puts toxic doses at 2 to 5 mg per kilo of body weight and fatal doses at 3 to 6 mg. Symptoms range from nausea to hallucinations.