Pastry Trivia
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48 free Pastry trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pastry is chemistry you can eat: fat and flour held apart in layers, or rubbed together until they crumble, or boiled into a paste that puffs hollow in the oven. Every country has its own answer to the question of what to wrap around a filling, and most of those answers come with a story attached. These 48 questions cover the doughs themselves and the terms bakers use for them, the named pastries of France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Balkans and the Americas, the pâtisseries and chefs who built reputations from sugar and butter, and the pies that turn up in nursery rhymes, idioms, musicals and penny dreadfuls. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the question left out. Play it to find out whether you know your sweet shortcrust from your laminated doughs, set it for a bake-club night, or print it for the quiz table.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The idiom 'eat humble pie' comes from 'umble pie', a low-status dish made from what?
Deer innards
Deer innards, called umbles, filled umble pie, considered low-class food; with the h of 'humble' then silent, the two similar-sounding words merged into a pun.
Q 02What did medieval cooks call a pie's thick, sturdy pastry case, using a word that then simply meant a box or basket?
Coffins
Coffins were pastry before they were burial boxes: the pie-crust sense dates from the late 14th century, the funeral one only from the 1520s, and the hard crust doubled as the baking dish.
Q 03A 1549 Italian cookbook gave a recipe for pies containing what, a between-courses amusement for 16th-century diners?
Live birds
Live birds flew out when the crust was cut, a banquet stunt of the kind remembered in the 'four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie' of Sing a Song of Sixpence.
Q 04Which penny-dreadful villain's victims were baked into meat pies by his partner in crime, Mrs Lovett?
Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd first appeared in The String of Pearls, serialised in 1846–47, where a lever on his barber's chair tips customers backward through a trap door.
Q 05Which jam-filled German pastry powers the urban legend that JFK called himself a doughnut in a 1963 speech?
Berliner
Berliner is the jelly doughnut's name across much of Germany, but the idea that 'Ich bin ein Berliner' meant 'I am a doughnut' only emerged two decades after the speech and is false.
Q 06Which country fought France in the 1838 'Pastry War', sparked by a pastry cook's damage claim in Tacubaya?
Mexico
Mexico agreed to pay 600,000 pesos and the French fleet withdrew in March 1839; the fighting cost Santa Anna a leg and revived his standing at home.
Q 07Cornish tin miners supposedly ate a pasty by its crimped edge, then discarded that crust to avoid traces of what?
Arsenic
Arsenic is the poison in this popular theory about the side crimp, though old photographs show pasties wrapped in paper bags and eaten from end to end, 'the true Cornish way'.
Q 08Which Chinese pastry carries a folk tale of rebel messages smuggled inside it to topple the Yuan dynasty?
Mooncake
Mooncake messages, the tale goes, spread under cover of a rumour that only special mooncakes could ward off a plague; the pastry is the centrepiece of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Q 09Which dish wraps fillet steak and mushroom duxelles in puff pastry?
Beef Wellington
Beef Wellington's link to the Duke of Wellington is more legend than fact: the name is not recorded until around 1900, half a century after his death, and its likely model is France's filet de boeuf en croûte.
Q 10Which French puff pastry dessert is sold as a 'custard slice' in Britain and a 'Napoleon' across North America?
Mille-feuille
Mille-feuille means 'thousand-sheets', and the name is not far off: six folds of three layers give classic puff pastry 729 layers, and some modern recipes reach 2,048.
Q 11Which British pudding fills shortcrust with golden syrup and breadcrumbs, its earliest known recipe by Mary Jewry?
Treacle tart
Treacle tart uses golden syrup, also known as light treacle, and is served warm with clotted cream, custard or ice cream; mentions of it predate Jewry's late-19th-century cookbooks.
Q 12Which Sara Bareilles musical, based on a 2007 Adrienne Shelly film, follows diner pie baker Jenna Hunterson?
Waitress
Waitress opened on Broadway in April 2016 with Jessie Mueller as Jenna; Sara Bareilles later took the role herself, starring in the 2021 return that was filmed for cinemas.
Q 13Which 1990 David Lynch series wove cherry pie, coffee and owls around the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer?
Twin Peaks
Q 21Which Caribbean turnover, influenced by the Cornish pasty, gets its golden shell from egg yolk, annatto or turmeric?
Jamaican patty
Jamaican patty fillings are savoury ground meat, and the Creole dish blends the pasty brought by British colonists and Cornish sailors with the turnovers of the Spanish Caribbean.
Q 22Which pastry's elastic, sugar-free dough is stretched by hand until, purists say, a newspaper can be read through it?
Strudel
Strudel dough, Strudelteig, is high-gluten flour, water, oil and salt, worked hard and then drawn thin over the backs of the hands with a linen tea towel; apple and Topfen quark are the classic fillings.
Q 23In which TV series does Ned, a pie-maker who revives the dead with one touch, run a restaurant called The Pie Hole?
Twin Peaks opens with logger Pete Martell finding the body wrapped in plastic on a riverbank; Lynch and Mark Frost stacked the show with motifs from fir trees to doughnuts.
Q 14Which Leicestershire town's pork pie, hand-formed around uncured meat that cooks grey, holds protected geographical status?
Melton Mowbray
Melton Mowbray pies may only carry the name if made to the traditional recipe within a designated zone around the town, and that recipe's uncured pork is what leaves the filling grey when cooked.
Q 15Which US state made the Cornish pasty a cultural symbol of its far north, with an annual pasty festival in Calumet?
Michigan
Michigan's Upper Peninsula made pasty shops a tourist attraction, and Cornish lead miners also carried the pasty to Mineral Point, Wisconsin, during the 1830s mineral rush.
Q 16Which Greek savoury pie layers spinach, feta and egg between sheets of filo?
Spanakopita
Spanakopita with cheese can also be called spanakotiropita, and a version made without cheese or eggs is eaten during fasting periods in Greece.
Q 17Which crust, steamed for hours around the raw meat in a pudding basin, encloses a traditional steak and kidney pudding?
Suet pastry
Suet pastry wraps the raw meat in a pudding basin that steams for hours; Mrs Beeton printed the first recipe to add kidney to the steak in 1859, sent in by a reader in Sussex.
Q 18Which folded turnover has seafood fillings in Robert de Nola's Llibre del Coch, a Catalan cookbook of 1520?
Empanada
Empanada means 'breaded' in Spanish, and Robert de Nola's Catalan cookbook lists them among its Catalan, Italian, French and Arabian recipes; in Ghana and Nigeria they are simply 'meatpies'.
Q 19Which filled Polish doughnuts are eaten on Tłusty Czwartek, the 'Fat Thursday' before Lent, to use up the lard?
Pączki
Pączki Day is also celebrated by the Polish communities of Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee, and the tradition began as a way to empty the house of lard, sugar, eggs and fruit before Lent.
Q 20Which puff pastry biscuit, also sold as 'pig's ears' and 'elephant ears', is folded into a heart or butterfly shape?
Palmier
Palmier is short for feuille de palmier, and the biscuit was only invented at the start of the 20th century; Italians call them Prussiane, mocking the supposedly large ears of Prussian invaders.
Pushing Daisies
Pushing Daisies ran on ABC from 2007 to 2009 with Lee Pace as Ned, whose gift has a catch: anything kept alive for more than a minute costs another life nearby.
Q 24Which shortcut to classic laminated dough mixes the butter into the base itself rather than folding in a solid block?
Rough puff
Rough puff, also sold as blitz or flaky pastry, exists because the classic method is laborious; France's oldest documented flaky pastry recipe sits in a 1311 charter from Robert, bishop of Amiens.
Q 25Which stiff pastry, moulded while still warm, is hand-raised around pork pies and game pies?
Hot water crust
Hot water crust sags a little as the filled pie bakes, which is accepted as the mark of a hand-made pie; the moulded paste holds its shape as it cools and copes with very wet fillings.
Q 26Which French pâtissier, apprenticed to Gaston Lenôtre at 14, was dubbed 'the Picasso of Pastry' by Vogue?
Pierre Hermé
Pierre Hermé launched his own brand with Charles Znaty in 1998 and opened its first boutique in Tokyo, not Paris, which had to wait until 2001; he was named World's Best Pastry Chef in 2016.
Q 27Which Paris tea house, opened in 1903 by confectioner Antoine Rumpelmayer, counted Proust and Coco Chanel as regulars?
Angelina
Angelina was run from 1916 by the founder's widowed daughter-in-law of the same name, and is famed for an almost pudding-thick hot chocolate, the chocolat l'Africain, and its Mont Blanc.
Q 28Which city's pistachio baklava became, in 2013, the first Turkish product to win EU protected geographical status?
Gaziantep
Gaziantep only got baklava in 1871, when Çelebi Güllü brought back a recipe learned from a Syrian chef in Damascus; it is served with kaymak cream.
Q 29Which French choux pastry stacks a small cream-filled case on a larger one, joined with piped buttercream?
Religieuse
Religieuse means 'nun', and it has a film-star offshoot: the pastel courtesan au chocolat was invented for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Q 30Which hollow puff pastry case is credited to Carême, though its name was in print decades before his birth?
Vol-au-vent
Vol-au-vent is literally 'flight in the wind', a nod to its lightness; a starter in France, it is a main course in Belgium, filled with creamy chicken and mushrooms and often served with fries.