Thanksgiving Food Trivia
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97 free Thanksgiving Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Thanksgiving Food trivia questions with answers. Thanksgiving is the one American holiday built entirely around a menu, and every dish on it has a backstory. This quiz works through the whole table: how the Broad Breasted White took over the turkey business, what Butterball's Turkey Talk-Line gets asked most, why Dorcas Reilly's 1955 casserole eats 40 percent of America's cream of mushroom soup, how a mountain of unsold Swanson turkey became the TV dinner, and what the Plymouth colonists actually ate in 1621 (hint: not potatoes). It covers cranberry sauce, stuffing versus dressing, pumpkin and pecan pie, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, Parker House rolls, Tofurky, leftovers sandwiches, Beaujolais nouveau, Canadian Thanksgiving and regional tables from Baltimore sauerkraut to Puerto Rican arroz con gandules. Easy openers sit beside genuinely hard ones, so it suits a family game after dinner, a Friendsgiving round or a November pub quiz. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia, official company pages, Smithsonian or primary sources, and each question shows its citation, so any argument over the canned-versus-fresh cranberry question can be settled at the table.
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Q 01Which people's leader Massasoit brought some ninety men and five deer to Plymouth's 1621 harvest feast?
Wampanoag
Wampanoag. The one eyewitness letter mentions their venison and the colonists' 'fowl', which a Plimoth food historian suspects meant goose or duck, and never names turkey.
Q 02In his 1621 letter from Plymouth, Edward Winslow wrote that the bay was 'full of' which shellfish all summer?
Lobsters
Lobsters. He added that a hogshead of eels could be taken in one September night and that mussels lay 'at our doors', which is why food historians think seafood was probably on the table at the harvest feast.
Q 03The 1621 harvest feast had no pies because the colonists lacked butter and what else?
Wheat flour
Wheat flour. With no pastry, pies and tarts were out; a Plimoth food historian thinks the gaps on the table were filled with 'meat, meat and more meat'.
Q 04Which amino acid in turkey is popularly blamed for the sleepy feeling after Thanksgiving dinner?
Tryptophan
Tryptophan. Turkey has no more of it than chicken does; researchers point instead to the carbohydrate-heavy sides and desserts eaten alongside.
Q 05Which Founding Father called the turkey 'a much more respectable bird' than the bald eagle?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin. He never proposed the turkey as the national bird: the line comes from a letter to his daughter mocking an eagle design that looked like a turkey and calling the eagle a bird of 'bad moral character'.
Q 06Given their huge breasts, how do most Broad Breasted White turkeys reproduce?
Through artificial insemination
Through artificial insemination. Bred for ever more breast meat, the toms have grown too large to mate without injuring the hens, so their semen is collected and the hens are inseminated.
Q 07According to Butterball, what do callers to its Turkey Talk-Line ask about most often?
Thawing time
Thawing time. A frozen bird needs a day in the fridge for every four pounds, which many callers learn too late; one family who left theirs outside overnight rang to ask how to find it under the snow.
Q 08What is the term for cutting out a turkey's backbone and flattening it so that it roasts faster?
Spatchcocking
Spatchcocking. The word turned up in 18th-century Ireland for a fowl killed and grilled on the spot, and it may be short for 'dispatch cock', though dictionaries call its origin uncertain.
Q 09Before it named the American bird, the English word 'turkey' was first used for which other bird?
Guinea fowl
Guinea fowl. The African birds were thought to reach England by way of Turkey and were called turkey-cocks; when the larger American bird arrived in the 1500s, people confused the two and the name moved over.
Q 10Deep-fried whole turkey spread across America from the outdoor cooking of which regional cuisine?
Cajun
Cajun. A 1984 newspaper story on the oddity described a cook harnessing a 25-pound bird in rope and lowering it into boiling peanut oil, and said no other place could have invented it.
Q 11Which NFL broadcaster made the turducken famous by showing it off during his Thanksgiving Day telecasts?
John Madden
John Madden. Handed his first one in the broadcast booth with no plate or cutlery, he ate it with his hands, and he went on showing the dish to viewers for years.
Q 12Cranberry growers flood their beds at harvest time because the ripe berries do what in water?
Float
Float. Each berry holds small pockets of air, so once machines nicknamed 'egg-beaters' knock the fruit off the vines it bobs to the surface, where it can be corralled and pumped out.
Q 13After a contamination scare in 1959, what did President Eisenhower's Thanksgiving dinner serve in place of cranberry sauce?
Applesauce
Q 21Campbell's says Dorcas Reilly's 1955 Thanksgiving casserole takes about 40% of its sales of which soup?
Cream of mushroom
Cream of mushroom. The casserole took off once Campbell's began printing the recipe on that soup's own cans, and Reilly said later that she was 'shocked' to learn how popular it had become.
Q 22In 2002 Dorcas Reilly gave her original casserole recipe card to which institution, then based in Akron, Ohio?
National Inventors Hall of Fame
National Inventors Hall of Fame. Its archive keeps the handwritten card with her notes on each trial run; in the same test kitchen she also worked up tuna noodle casserole and Sloppy Joes made with tomato soup.
Q 23Which instant stuffing mix did home economist Ruth Siems help invent for General Foods, launched in 1972?
Applesauce. Weeks before the holiday the government had warned that some of the crop carried traces of a weedkiller that caused cancer in rats, and sales of fresh cranberries collapsed.
Q 14Which everyday baking word, borrowed from Dutch, appears in Amelia Simmons's 1796 book of American recipes?
Cookie
Cookie. Her recipes include a 'Christmas Cookey', from the Dutch koekje, 'little cake'; where British cookbooks said small cakes or biscuits, hers used the American word.
Q 15American Cookery (1796) taught American cooks to use pearlash, a forerunner of which kitchen staple?
Baking soda
Baking soda. Pearlash raised a cake chemically, without yeast, and set off a revolution in American baking; of the author, almost nothing is known beyond her title-page line, 'An American Orphan'.
Q 16Morton, Illinois, the 'Pumpkin Capital of the World', is home to which brand's pumpkin cannery?
Libby's
Libby's. The cannery is there because a farmer named Dickinson brought his Kentucky pumpkin seeds to central Illinois, where they grew so well that a processing plant followed; it still cans most of America's pumpkin.
Q 17Most American canned pumpkin is the Dickinson variety, a look-alike of which squash?
Butternut
Butternut. Tan and oblong rather than round and orange, the Dickinson belongs to the same species, and its dry, fine-grained flesh bakes into a far smoother pie filling than a carving pumpkin would give.
Q 18Which pie, a Southern speciality, is often served at Thanksgiving in place of pumpkin?
Sweet potato pie
Sweet potato pie. Enslaved Africans, who knew the yam from home, likely took to the similar American root, and some call the pie made from it a cornerstone of soul food.
Q 19Pumpkin pie spice is mostly cinnamon, blended with ginger, cloves, allspice and which other spice?
Nutmeg
Nutmeg. The mix is far older than the pie: medieval cooks used much the same sweet spices on meat, and a 1796 American recipe for 'pompkin' pudding already called for nutmeg, mace and ginger.
Q 20Dorcas Reilly created which casserole in a Campbell's test kitchen in 1955, now a Thanksgiving fixture?
Green bean casserole
Green bean casserole. A news agency had asked for a quick dish made from things any cook already had in the cupboard, and it first went onto the soup cans under the name 'Green Bean Bake'.
Stove Top
Stove Top. The secret was the size of the dried bread crumb: too small and water turned it to mush, too large and it came out like gravel, and getting it right earned a patent in 1975.
Q 24Besides the heart and liver, which organ is traditionally among a turkey's giblets?
Gizzard
Gizzard. It is the thick-walled part of the stomach where a toothless bird grinds its food with swallowed grit; simmered with the neck and the rest, it flavours giblet gravy.
Q 25Stuffing baked in its own dish rather than inside the bird is often called what?
Dressing
Dressing. Older cookbooks called the mixture 'farce' or 'forcemeat', and the US Department of Agriculture now advises cooking it outside the turkey anyway, because stuffing in the cavity can stay undercooked.
Q 26Which herb is the standard seasoning in classic American Thanksgiving stuffing?
Sage
Sage. Long before it reached the stuffing it was prized as a medicine: the name comes from the Latin salvus, 'healthy', for the healing powers once credited to the plant.
Q 27Traditional Southern cornbread differs from Northern versions by containing little or none of what?
Sugar
Sugar. By one food historian's account, old stone-ground cornmeal was sweet enough on its own; steel roller mills, arriving after 1900, stripped out flavour, and newer recipes added sugar to make up for it.
Q 28A classic turkey gravy is thickened with which cooked paste of flour and fat?
Roux
Roux. The flour is stirred into the hot fat until smooth and cooked before any stock goes in; the longer it browns, the deeper the flavour, though a dark one thickens less.
Q 29Which president served his dinner guests 'a pie called macaroni'?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson. At an 1802 dinner one guest took the pasta for onions and found it 'very strong'; Jefferson had taken to pasta in France, where his enslaved cook James Hemings trained.
Q 30Parker House rolls were invented in the 1870s at a hotel in which city?
Boston
Boston. Legend blames their folded, dented shape on an angry pastry cook who flung unfinished rolls into the oven; the same Parker House hotel kitchen also lays claim to the Boston cream pie.