Scandinavian Food
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49 free Scandinavian Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Scandinavian food is what happens when long winters, short salt supplies and a lot of coastline meet. Herring was fermented in cans that still must not be opened indoors, cod was dried and soaked in lye, salmon was buried in sand, and whey was boiled down into a brown cheese that a Norwegian milkmaid turned into a national icon. Then Copenhagen chefs wrote a manifesto in 2004 and the region's restaurants became the most talked-about in the world. These 49 questions cover Sweden, Denmark and Norway with a few detours to Iceland and Finland: surströmming's third-Thursday-in-August premiere, smørrebrød on rugbrød, Jansson's temptation and its mistranslated sprats, flæskesteg on Christmas Eve, fårikål's feast day, semlor on Shrove Tuesday, kanelbullens dag, the crayfish party, akvavit and its snapsvisa, lefse, lingonberries and cloudberries, Noma and New Nordic Cuisine. The expert tier asks about Anne Hov, Oskar Davidsen, the 1939 World's Fair and the word that Danes use to trip up foreigners. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play solo or print it for a Nordic dinner.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Surströmming is a fermented version of which fish?
Baltic herring
Baltic herring. The small strömming is caught before it spawns and salted so lightly that it ferments instead of rotting; the gas goes on building until the tins bulge.
Q 02Why did Sweden once ban surströmming sales before late summer?
To keep unripe fish out
To keep unripe fish out. Tins had been reaching shops before the fish had fermented, so a law fixed the first day of sale; it lapsed in 1998, yet the tins are still held back for a late-summer 'premiere'.
Q 03Lutefisk is dried whitefish cured in what?
Lye
Lye. It was first made from birch ash, and the soaked fish is so caustic that it must sit in fresh water for days before it can be cooked.
Q 04Which fish is most commonly used for lutefisk?
Cod
Cod. It starts as stockfish, cod dried hard on outdoor racks; days of soaking are what turn it soft and jelly-like again.
Q 05Smørrebrød is usually built on which bread?
Rugbrød
Rugbrød. Slices of the dark rye were a plain packed lunch until Danish kitchens of the 1880s began piling them high with roast pork, fish and liver pâté.
Q 06What does 'smørrebrød' literally mean?
Butter and bread
Butter and bread. Swedish is odder: its word for the same open sandwich, smörgås, joins 'butter' and 'goose', the goose being a lump of butter that floats up in the churn.
Q 07Swedish lussekatter, saffron buns curled into an S, are baked for which winter feast?
St Lucia's Day
St Lucia's Day. On 13 December a girl crowned with candles leads a white-robed procession, and the saffron buns are handed round with coffee.
Q 08Gravlax is traditionally served with hovmästarsås, a sweet sauce built on which condiment?
Mustard
Mustard. Norwegians simply call it sennepssaus, 'mustard sauce'; it is spooned over salmon that has been cured, never cooked, under salt and sugar.
Q 09The 'grav' in gravlax refers to what medieval practice?
Burying the fish in sand
Burying the fish in sand. Medieval fishermen salted their salmon and left it to ferment lightly above the high-tide line; today's version is only cured, never buried.
Q 10Swedish meatballs are traditionally served with jam made from which berry?
Lingonberry
Lingonberry. Swedes treat the tart jam as an all-purpose relish, spooning it over black pudding, fried liver and even porridge as well.
Q 11About how many meatballs a year was IKEA selling by 2022?
1 billion
1 billion. Meatballs reached the menu only in the mid-1980s, when IKEA overhauled its ailing restaurants on its founder's conviction that shoppers with full stomachs buy more furniture.
Q 12In 2018, Sweden's official Twitter account claimed meatballs originated where?
Turkey
Turkey. The tweet said King Charles XII brought the recipe home from exile in the early 1700s; a leading Swedish food historian called the story fabricated.
Q 13What colour is the smooth outer layer of a traditional Swedish princess cake?
Green
Green. The cookbook that carried the recipe called it plain 'green cake'; its author taught three Swedish princesses, and their fondness for it is said to have given the cake its royal name.
Q 21Swedes mark Kanelbullens dag each 4 October with cinnamon rolls whose dough is also spiced with what?
Cardamom
Cardamom. It is what sets the Swedish roll apart; the day itself was invented in 1999 by Sweden's Home Baking Council to keep people baking at home.
Q 22A semla is a soft wheat bun filled with whipped cream and what?
Almond paste
Almond paste. Finns often swap it for jam, so their bakeries sell both kinds and the country argues every year over which filling is the real one.
Q 23Semlor are traditionally associated with which day?
Shrove Tuesday
Shrove Tuesday. It was the last rich treat before Lent; legend has it that King Adolf Frederick died in 1771 after a feast that ended with 14 of them.
Q 14Thursday pea soup in Sweden is said to date from when Friday was what?
Fast day
Fast day. With meat off the table on Fridays, Catholic households are said to have filled up on pea soup and pork the day before, and the habit outlived the Reformation.
Q 15In Sweden, Thursday's pea soup is traditionally followed by which dessert?
Pancakes with jam
Pancakes with jam. The thin pancakes joined the soup later, and the pair still turns up in school canteens and army mess halls every Thursday.
Q 16Swedish 'ansjovis', baked into Jansson's temptation, are really which small fish, cured with spices?
Sprats
Sprats. Swedes have sold spice-cured sprats as 'ansjovis' since the 1800s, so English versions of the recipe keep calling, wrongly, for anchovies.
Q 17Smörgåsbord won American fans when Sweden's pavilion served it at the 1939 World's Fair in which city?
New York
New York. The pavilion's Three Crowns Restaurant made the buffet famous; at home it had begun as a side table of snacks taken with schnapps before dinner.
Q 18What is the Swedish Christmas buffet called?
Julbord
Julbord. It is a smörgåsbord eaten in courses, cold fish first, built around a Christmas ham that is boiled, then glazed with egg and breadcrumbs.
Q 19Why was Swedish crispbread traditionally baked as a round with a hole in the middle?
To hang it on poles
To hang it on poles. Households baked only twice a year, so the rounds were threaded on long poles under the ceiling, where they dried and kept for months.
Q 20What is the Swedish coffee-and-cake break called?
Fika
Fika. Sweden banned coffee five times between 1756 and the early 1800s; today many Swedish firms make the fika break mandatory.
Q 24In which month are Swedish crayfish parties traditionally held?
August
August. A law against overfishing once held the crayfish season back until then, so the first catch became a party, eaten outdoors under paper moon lanterns.
Q 25Under EU rules, akvavit's dominant flavour must come from caraway and/or which seed?
Dill
Dill. Norway's Linie aquavit goes a step further for its flavour: the oak casks are shipped to Australia and back across the equator before bottling.
Q 26What is the best-known Swedish drinking song sung before a shot of akvavit?
Helan Går
Helan Går. The title means 'the whole goes down', an order to drain the first glass; Sweden's 1957 world-champion ice hockey team sang it in place of the anthem.
Q 27What do Danes call the pastry the rest of the world knows as 'Danish'?
Wienerbrød
Wienerbrød. It means 'Vienna bread', because the layered dough reached Danish bakers from Austria in the mid-1800s; in Vienna the same pastry is called a Kopenhagener.
Q 28Flæskesteg, a Danish national dish, is roast pork always served with what?
Crackling
It is the traditional Christmas Eve dinner, with boiled and caramelised potatoes.
Q 29Rødgrød med fløde, the Danish dessert served with cream, is a thickened pudding of what?
Stewed berries
Stewed berries. Red ones such as strawberries and redcurrants are cooked and thickened, and Danes have used the dish's name to test foreigners' pronunciation since the early 1900s.
Q 30Danish æbleskiver, whose name means 'apple slices', are today what kind of Christmas treat?
Round pancake puffs
Round pancake puffs. The first ones really were pieces of apple fried in batter; today the batter is cooked on its own in a pan of round hollows.