50 free Pasta trivia questions with answers. Pasta has 310 known shapes and more than 1,300 names for them, and this quiz digs into the stories behind the noodles. It starts with history: the Sicilian export trade of 1154, the Marco Polo myth and the advert that probably started it, the first pasta factory, and the surprisingly late arrival of tomato sauce. Then the shapes: why penne look like pen nibs, which pasta is a 'priest strangler', what farfalle, orecchiette, vermicelli and gnocchi actually mean. The classic dishes get their turn: carbonara's guanciale, cacio e pepe's shepherds, the two cities fighting over tortellini, the pasta Bologna really eats with its ragù, and the golden fork behind fettuccine Alfredo. Then the supermarket aisle: Barilla, Kraft Dinner's rubber-band origin, Chef Boyardee, SpaghettiOs, instant ramen and the BBC's spaghetti-tree hoax. Easy questions suit a family dinner-table quiz; harder ones will test Italophiles and cooks. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the dishes and shapes, and the source sentence appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'pasta' comes from the Italian for what?
Paste
It traces further back through Late Latin to the Greek word for barley porridge.
Q 02Traditionally, dried pasta was made only from which type of wheat?
Durum
Its name is Latin for 'hard', and it makes up only 5 to 8 percent of the world's wheat crop.
Q 03Roughly how many specific pasta shapes are known, under more than 1,300 documented names?
310
Names for the same shape often change from one Italian town to the next.
Q 04Many historians think pasta in its modern form reached Italy through which island?
Sicily
A 1154 text describes dried string pasta being made near Palermo and exported across the Mediterranean.
Q 05The story that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China is widely regarded as what?
A myth
Food writer Jane Grigson traced the tale to a 1920s or 30s advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.
Q 06A geographer writing for Roger II in 1154 described dried pasta exported from which town near Palermo?
Trabia
Al-Idrisi called it itriyya, the Arabic word for the string-like semolina shapes.
Q 07Where was a licence for the first pasta factory issued in 1740?
Venice
Hungary's first steam-powered pasta factory followed in Pest in 1859.
Q 08The first written record of pasta with tomato sauce appears in a cookbook from which year?
1790
Tomatoes had been in Italy since the 16th century but took two hundred years to reach the pasta bowl.
Q 09Which country consumed the most pasta per person in 2015, at 23.5 kg each?
Italy
Italians eat more pasta than the country's own wheat harvest can supply, so it imports wheat to keep up.
Q 10Which country was the world's largest total consumer of pasta in 2017, eating 2.7 million tons?
United States
Per person, though, Americans trail Italians by a wide margin.
Q 11The Italian phrase 'al dente' literally means what?
To the tooth
Al dente pasta also has a lower glycemic index than pasta cooked soft.
Q 12Farfalle pasta is named after the Italian word for what?
Butterflies
In Emilia-Romagna the same shape is called strichetti, a local word for bow ties.
Q 13Orecchiette, meaning 'little ears', is the signature pasta of which Italian region?
Apulia
The classic dish pairs them with rapini, anchovies, garlic and chilli.
Q 14Penne pasta is named for its resemblance to what?
Q 21The pasta name rigatoni comes from the Italian word rigato, meaning what?
Ridged
Unlike penne, rigatoni are cut straight across rather than diagonally.
Q 22Cannelloni is Italian for what?
Large reeds
They are egg-pasta cylinders, stuffed and baked under sauce.
Q 23Bucatini, the thick spaghetti with a hollow centre, takes its name from buco, meaning what?
Hole
In the south of the country the same pasta is called perciatelli, from the local word for 'pierced'.
Q 24Academic consensus traces the word 'macaroni' to a Greek word meaning what?
A pen nib
It is one of the few shapes with a birthday: a Genoese pasta maker patented the diagonal cutting machine in 1865.
Q 15Which pasta shape's name translates as 'priest strangler'?
Strozzapreti
One legend says gluttonous priests ate it so fast they choked; another that angry housewives cursed the clergy as they rolled it.
Q 16Vermicelli takes its name from the Italian for what?
Little worms
Confusingly, it is thinner than spaghetti in English-speaking countries but thicker in Italy.
Q 17Linguine, meaning 'little tongues', originated in which city?
Genoa
It was first documented in the 1700s served with green beans, potatoes and pesto.
Q 18Spaghetti means 'little strings'; a thicker version is called what?
Spaghettoni
Spaghettini is the thinner form and capellini thinner still.
Q 19Fusilli, the corkscrew pasta, is named after what?
A spindle
Traditionally the dough was wrapped around a fuso, or spindle; in North America it is often sold as rotini.
Q 20Conchiglie pasta gets its name from the Italian word for what?
Seashells
The Italian conchiglia and the English 'conch' share the same Greek root.
Blessed
The root makaria referred to the 'blessed dead', possibly via a funeral barley broth.
Q 25Gnocchi may take their name from nocchio, the Italian word for what?
A knot in wood
Potatoes only entered the recipe in the late 19th century, when milling wheat became too costly for small farmers.
Q 26Carbonara is traditionally made with pecorino romano and which cured pork?
Guanciale
The name first appears in print in a 1939 Dutch East Indies newspaper describing a restaurant in Rome's Trastevere.
Q 27Cacio e pepe, the Roman pecorino and pepper dish, is popularly said to have been created by whom?
Shepherds
Historians doubt the pepper part: it was too expensive for shepherds when the dish supposedly arose.
Q 28The name pesto comes from a Genoese verb meaning what?
To pound
The same Latin root gives English the word pestle; basil only entered the recipe in the 1850s.
Q 29Which two cities both claim to be the birthplace of tortellini?
Bologna and Modena
A legend set between them says the shape copies the navel of Venus, glimpsed by an innkeeper through a keyhole.
Q 30The word lasagna may derive from a Greek word meaning what?
Chamber pot
Another theory points to laganon, a flat sheet of dough; the first recorded recipe is from the early 14th century.