Sausages Trivia
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50 free Sausages trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sausages are one of humanity's oldest ways of wasting nothing, and every food culture has its own tube of seasoned meat. This quiz covers them all, from an Akkadian tablet to a hot-dog-eating contest on Coney Island. The easy questions ask why British sausages are called bangers, what goes into black pudding, which country gave us bratwurst, what makes chorizo red and where the frankfurter and the wiener got their names. From there it moves into the details: what a casing is made of, why haggis is a Burns Night dish, how long a Cumberland sausage is, why a Bavarian never eats a weisswurst after noon and what Herta Heuwer poured over a sausage in 1949. The harder end is for the true wurst enthusiast: the Roman lucanica, the Byzantine emperor who banned blood sausage, the 1313 Nuremberg record, the coronation frankfurters, Charles Feltman's Coney Island cart, the Tad Dorgan myth, the sausage that started Oscar Mayer, mortadella's mortar, boerewors law, saveloy etymology, the pigs' brains in cervelat, the Lorne sausage, Greggs' 140 million sausage rolls a year and the Kobayashi era of competitive eating. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on sausages and their national varieties, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our cheese, bread and world food quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'sausage' ultimately derives from a Latin word meaning seasoned with what?
Salt
Salt: Latin salsus, 'salted', named the way chopped scraps were preserved before stuffing, and the same root gave English sauce, salsa and salad.
Q 02What are traditional sausage casings made from?
Cleaned intestines
Cleaned intestines, usually from pigs or sheep, are the classic skin; a 'skinless' hot dog is cooked inside a cellulose casing that is peeled off before it is packed.
Q 03Which ancient Greek poet compared a restless hero to a blood sausage being turned over a fire?
Homer
Homer: in the Odyssey, Odysseus lies awake plotting revenge on his wife's suitors, tossing like a stomach stuffed with fat and blood beside a blazing fire.
Q 04Greek loukaniko and Bulgarian lukanka both descend from a sausage the Romans named after what?
A region of Italy
A region of Italy: Roman writers said soldiers learned the spiced, smoked lucanica from the people of Lucania, in the south, and the name then spread east through Greek.
Q 05Which illness takes its name from the Latin word for sausage?
Botulism
Botulism comes from botulus, Latin for sausage: German doctors first traced the illness to badly made blood sausages and called it sausage poisoning.
Q 06Why are British sausages said to be nicknamed 'bangers'?
They tend to burst when cooked
They tend to burst when cooked: sausages bulked out with water during wartime meat shortages are said to have popped in the pan, though the word's origin isn't certain.
Q 07Which herb traditionally dominates the seasoning of Lincolnshire's famous bangers?
Sage
Sage gives the Lincolnshire sausage its taste, yet a bid to protect the name failed in 2012: ministers ruled its link to the county wasn't strong enough.
Q 08What is the Christmas side dish of small sausages wrapped in bacon called?
Pigs in blankets
Pigs in blankets: in Britain the blanket is bacon, usually around a chipolata, while the American dish of almost the same name wraps the sausage in pastry instead.
Q 09What is toad in the hole?
Sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding batter
Sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding batter came late: the dish began as a way to stretch scraps of meat, and early recipes called for beef, kidneys or even pigeon.
Q 10Which English county's sausage is sold in a long flat coil up to 50 centimetres long?
Cumberland
Cumberland sausage won protected status in 2011: only sausage made in Cumbria with at least 80% meat may be sold as Traditional Cumberland sausage.
Q 11What is Scotland's square, casing-free breakfast slice called?
Lorne sausage
Lorne sausage is popularly said to be named after the comedian Tommy Lorne, but butchers were already advertising it in the 1890s, when he was still a small child.
Q 12Which non-meat ingredient, in high proportion, sets British black pudding apart?
Cereal such as oatmeal
Cereal such as oatmeal bulks out the blood and fat. Each September in Ramsbottom, contestants hurl black puddings at a stack of Yorkshire puddings in a world championship.
Q 13What was haggis traditionally encased in?
A sheep's stomach
Q 21Who is credited with inventing currywurst at a West Berlin food stand in 1949?
Herta Heuwer
Herta Heuwer is said to have got her curry powder from the British in occupied Berlin, though Hamburg disputes the honour, insisting its own sausage sellers got there two years earlier.
Q 22Which German carmaker makes its own currywurst, complete with an official part number?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen has made the sausage at its Wolfsburg plant since 1973; when bosses took it off a canteen menu in 2021, ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder protested and it was reinstated with apologies.
Q 23Frankfurter Würstchen were traditionally handed out at what events?
Imperial coronations
A sheep's stomach held the animal's minced heart, liver and lungs, and the lungs are why the United States shut out traditional haggis in 1971, under a rule against lungs in food.
Q 14Which poet's 1786 'Address to a Haggis' made it Scotland's national dish?
Robert Burns
Robert Burns's poem is recited over the dish at Burns suppers each 25 January, and the speaker plunges a knife into the haggis at the line about cutting it up.
Q 15Which British high-street chain sells more than a million sausage rolls every week?
Greggs
Greggs launched a vegan sausage roll in 2019 that sold so fast it had to raise production, and the bakery chain then set about making vegan versions of its other bestsellers.
Q 16What gives Spanish chorizo its deep red colour?
Smoked paprika
Smoked paprika, or pimentón: in La Vera the peppers are dried over oak smoke before grinding, which is why the sausage tastes smoky as well as looking red.
Q 17In which German city is bratwurst first documented, in 1313?
Nuremberg
Nuremberg's finger-sized bratwursts won EU protection in 2003, so only sausages made inside the city limits to a fixed recipe may carry its name.
Q 18What is the characteristic herb of Franconian bratwurst?
Marjoram
Marjoram is so bound up with German sausage-making that one of its everyday German names is Wurstkraut, literally 'sausage herb'.
Q 19A Bavarian saying holds that weisswurst must not be allowed to hear what?
The noon church bells
The noon church bells: the rule is usually traced to the days before refrigeration, when a sausage made fresh at dawn without smoking or curing would not keep past midday.
Q 20What are weisswürste made from?
Minced veal and pork fatback
Minced veal and pork fatback fill a skin that isn't eaten: the traditional way, called zuzeln, is to bite open one end and suck the meat out.
Imperial coronations were held in Frankfurt from 1562, and while the new emperor dined indoors, the crowd on the Römerberg square got a roast ox and the city's sausages.
Q 24The word 'wiener' refers to which city?
Vienna
Vienna, Wien in German, named the wiener, yet Austrians call the same sausage a Frankfurter: a butcher trained in Frankfurt is said to have brought the recipe to their capital.
Q 25Nathan Handwerker worked for which Coney Island restaurateur before undercutting him with five-cent hot dogs?
Charles Feltman
Charles Feltman is said to have started with a pie cart fitted with a stove to boil sausages and a compartment to keep buns warm, one of several claims to the first hot dog.
Q 26A debunked legend says 'hot dog' was coined by a cartoonist unable to spell which word?
Dachshund
Dachshund: the tale has Tad Dorgan sketching barking 'dachshund sausages' at a ballgame and dodging the spelling, but no such cartoon has been found and the term was already in print.
Q 27On what date is the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest held each year?
July 4
July 4 suits the legend that four immigrants began the contest in 1916 to prove their patriotism, a story its publicist admitted in 2010 he had made up in the 1970s.
Q 28Which Japanese eater won six straight Nathan's contests from 2001 to 2006?
Takeru Kobayashi
Takeru Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs on his 2001 debut, about double the old record, by snapping each frank in half and dunking the buns in water.
Q 29What is the name of Oscar Mayer's hot-dog-shaped promotional vehicle, first built in 1936?
Wienermobile
The Wienermobile was renamed the Frankmobile in 2023 to promote an all-beef frank, but the change lasted just four months before the old name came back.
Q 30Which sausages did the Mayer brothers sell at their Chicago meat market in 1883?
Bratwurst and liverwurst
Bratwurst and liverwurst suited the German neighbourhoods around the shop, and in 1904 the brothers' firm began stamping its name on its meat, then unheard of among butchers.