Portuguese Food
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49 free Portuguese Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Portugal eats more fish per head than any other country in Europe, yet its favourite fish is one it never eats fresh. That contradiction is Portuguese food in a nutshell: salt cod from the Grand Banks, chillies from Africa, sugar and cinnamon from the spice routes, and a pastry tradition built by nuns who had egg yolks to spare. These 49 questions cover the whole table. Bacalhau and its 365 recipes, caldo verde, cozido à portuguesa, leitão à Bairrada, carne de porco à alentejana, tripe from Porto and the francesinha invented there in 1953, the alheira sausage created to fool the Inquisition, chouriço, farinheira and presunto from Chaves, queijo da Serra and São Jorge. From the pastelaria: pastéis de Belém and their secret room, doçaria conventual, fios de ovos and the bola de Berlim. From the glass: bica, vinho verde, port, Madeira and medronho. And Portugal's exports: piri-piri, tempura and kasutera in Japan, malassadas in Hawaii and the papo-seco in Jersey. Easy questions stick to bacalhau and custard tarts; the hard tier asks about olive-oil acidity grades, the Abbot of Lamego and the 1820 revolution that put monks in the pastry business. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On the night of June 12, Lisbon honours Saint Anthony with street parties and grilled what?
Sardines
Sardines, grilled on street corners and eaten on a slice of bread. The party honours Lisbon-born Saint Anthony, although the city's official patron saint is actually Saint Vincent.
Q 02The Portuguese boast a different salt cod recipe for every what?
Day of the year
Day of the year: the boast is 365 ways to cook it, all for a catch that has never swum in Portuguese waters. Some cookbooks push the claim past a thousand.
Q 03What does 'fiel amigo', Portugal's affectionate nickname for salt cod, mean?
Faithful friend
Faithful friend: salt cod was cheap, kept for months and reached every corner of the country, so ordinary families could always count on it for protein.
Q 04Boiled with potatoes and cabbage, bacalhau is Portugal's traditional supper on which night?
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve: the family supper, the consoada, is plain boiled salt cod drenched in olive oil. The leftovers come back at lunch on Christmas Day as roupa velha, 'old clothes'.
Q 05Which two countries supply most of the cod behind Portugal's bacalhau?
Iceland and Norway
Iceland and Norway: Norway alone supplies well over half of the cod Portugal eats, so the national dish is made almost entirely from imported cod.
Q 06Portugal eats more of what per head than any other EU country?
Fish
Fish: about 53 kg a head in 2023, more than double the EU average of 22.89 kg. Portugal held that lead even as Europe's overall appetite for seafood fell to a ten-year low.
Q 07What is caldo verde?
A potato and collard-green soup
A potato and collard-green soup from the Minho: the greens are shredded very finely and barely boiled, and each bowl usually gets a slice or two of chouriço.
Q 08Order a bica at a Lisbon café counter and what arrives?
An espresso
An espresso, small and strong: bica is also the Portuguese word for a spout. In the north the same cup is a cimbalino, named after the La Cimbali espresso machines.
Q 09Which Indian curry began as Portugal's carne de vinha d'alhos, pork in wine and garlic?
Vindaloo
Vindaloo comes from vinha d'alhos, the wine-and-garlic pork marinade the Portuguese carried to Goa. The 'aloo' is alho, garlic, and has nothing to do with potatoes.
Q 10What measure separates extra virgin from lesser grades of Portuguese olive oil?
Acidity in degrees
Acidity in degrees: extra virgin oil may hold no more than 0.8 percent free acid and virgin 2 percent. The worst grade, lampante, is named after lamp fuel and can't be eaten unrefined.
Q 11How is the stew cozido cooked at Furnas in the Azores?
In volcanic soil
In volcanic soil: pots of beef, pork, sausages and vegetables are lowered into holes in the steaming ground at Furnas and dug out hours later, cooked by the earth's heat alone.
Q 12What is caldeirada?
A fish stew like bouillabaisse
Turbot, monkfish, hake and mussels go in with potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, often in a clay pot.
Q 13People from which Portuguese city are nicknamed tripeiros, or tripe eaters?
Porto
Porto: by legend the city gave all its meat to the fleet that sailed to conquer Ceuta in 1415 and kept only the offal. Tripe with white beans is still the local signature.
Q 21What is a bifana?
A pork steak in a roll
A pork steak in a roll: thin slices simmered with garlic and wine. The name comes from bife, a word the Portuguese borrowed from the English beef, though there is none in it.
Q 22Ginjinha, the sweet liqueur Lisbon drinks by the shot, is made by steeping which fruit in brandy?
Sour cherries
Sour cherries: they steep in aguardente with sugar and cinnamon. At Lisbon's tiny ginjinha bars the one question is 'com ou sem elas?', with or without the cherries in your glass.
Q 23The cataplana, a clam-shaped copper pan for steaming seafood, is the pride of which region?
Algarve
Q 14What does francesinha, Porto's famous sandwich, literally mean?
Little French girl
Little French girl: the word is the feminine diminutive of francês. The story goes that the spicy sandwich was named after French women, thought bolder than the Portuguese of the 1950s.
Q 15The francesinha began in Porto as a take on which French café classic?
Croque monsieur
Croque monsieur: a cook back from France and Belgium rebuilt the toastie at A Regaleira with steak, sausage and a hot sauce, turning a light snack into a knife-and-fork meal.
Q 16The hot sauce poured over a francesinha is built on tomato and which drink?
Beer
Beer: it and tomato are the two constants of the sauce, along with a chilli kick. Beyond that every house makes it its own way and guards the recipe.
Q 17Pica-pau, a Portuguese bar snack of fried meat morsels speared with toothpicks, shares its name with which bird?
Woodpecker
Woodpecker: diners supposedly peck at the small pieces of garlicky fried pork or beef and pickles with a toothpick, the way the bird jabs at a tree.
Q 18Leitão, Bairrada's pride, is named for leite, milk; what is it?
Roast suckling pig
Roast suckling pig: a leitão is a piglet not yet weaned, hence the milk in its name. The Bairrada roasts them whole, while nearby towns fight over chanfana, goat stewed in red wine.
Q 19Which two ingredients are combined in carne de porco à alentejana?
Pork and clams
Pork and clams: cubes of marinated pork are fried golden, then the clams go in to open in the juices. One story credits cooks on the coast, who named it for the Alentejo's outdoor-reared pigs, tastier than their own fish-fed ones.
Q 20Bitoque, an everyday lunch plate in Portuguese cafés, is a small steak with chips, crowned with what?
A fried egg
A fried egg: the Portuguese call an egg-topped steak 'a cavalo', on horseback, because the egg looks as if it is riding the meat. Rice and salad usually share the plate.
Algarve: the two halves clamp shut and seal, so the pan works as a crude pressure cooker and the clams, prawns and pork inside steam in their own juices.
Q 24Portugal's secret Jews invented the alheira sausage to look as if they were eating what?
Pork
Pork: a house with no sausages hanging in the smokehouse invited the Inquisition's attention, so the story goes that converts stuffed theirs with poultry, game and bread instead.
Q 25Which Portuguese smoked sausage is stuffed mainly with wheat flour?
Farinheira
Farinheira, from farinha, flour: it looks like a meat sausage, but the filling is wheat flour, pork fat, paprika and white wine, so it eats soft and doughy.
Q 26Presunto de Barrancos, the prized ham of the Alentejo, comes from free-roaming black pigs fattened on what?
Acorns
Acorns: the pigs forage for them under the oaks, and the breed is unusually good at storing that rich diet as fat inside the muscle, which is what marbles the cured ham.
Q 27What is Queijo da Serra, Portugal's mountain cheese, made from?
Sheep's milk and thistle rennet
Sheep's milk and thistle rennet: dried cardoon flowers curdle the raw milk instead of animal rennet. A ripe one is so soft that you cut a lid in the rind and spoon it out.
Q 28Vinho verde may be red or white; why is it called 'green'?
It should be drunk young
It should be drunk young: verde means green as in unripe, the opposite of maduro, and the wines go on sale within months of the harvest. The region's wine board also credits its lush green landscape.
Q 29Why were Vinho Verde vines once trained up trees?
To free the ground
To free the ground: on tiny family plots the soil was wanted for food crops, so the vines were sent climbing up trees and poles and had to be picked from tall ladders.
Q 30What gives port wine its sweetness and strength?
Fermentation halted with grape spirit
Fermentation halted with grape spirit: the brandy goes in while the wine is still fermenting, so much of the grapes' natural sugar is never used up and the strength climbs to 19 to 22 percent.