Blizzard of Gizzards Trivia Quiz

Answer: Giblets

Giblets are the internal organs of birds, and frequently include the heart, gizzard, liver, and the neck. Often the giblets are removed, put into a bag, and then stuffed back into the bird, to torture unwitting Thanksgiving chefs.

If you do accidentally forget to remove the gizzards before cooking your turkey/chicken/other bird, don't worry; the bird is still safe to eat. I wouldn't recommend letting your guests know about the mixup, though giblet gravy is a popular dish in some regions of the Southeastern United States. The French stew called alicot is made of chicken giblets.

Answer: Israel

In 1999, Israel consumed 28.9 pounds of turkey per person per year; in comparison, Americans consumed only a paltry (poultry?) 17.6 pounds, good for second place worldwide (Thanksgiving accounts for roughly one-fifth of this turkey). In fact, turkey is popular across the whole Mediterranean. Turkey is a popular meat for shawarma.

The wild turkey is native to the US (apocryphally, Benjamin Franklin once proposed making it the national bird), but remarkably, the bird's tasty white meat wasn't well-known outside the country until modern times. Between 1990 and 2013, turkey production grew by a factor of 13.

Answer: Alligators

It's perhaps not for the faint-of-heart, but alligator stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey has caught on surprisingly well in some areas of the United States. The rice-based stuffing is spicy and tomato-based, which complements alligator, a mild white meat, well. Alligator is healthier than many red meats, with much protein and not very much fat; in fact, it has less cholesterol than chicken.

Unfortunately, buying enough alligator to make your stuffing might cost a pretty penny. A Cajun specialty, the meat could cost around 15 dollars per pound.

Answer: Twinkies

Not only is the recipe included in the Hostess cookbook: some people really do make their turkey stuffing with Twinkies. The first step is to remove the cream filling from the cake snacks. The cream is mixed with honey and slathered atop the turkey. The yellow cake is crushed and mixed with tart apples to make a sweet stuffing. Six Twinkies are good for stuffing a 16 pound turkey.

Then again, Twinkies might not be as disgusting as the stuffing recipe that the burger chain White Castle puts out every year. The company recommends taking ten of their sliders (no pickles), and mashing them into a bowl. Add celery, seasonings, chicken broth, and then stuff the turkey. You make the choice.

Answer: Sherlock Holmes

It's not Thanksgiving, but Christmas, when Sherlock Holmes got called in to solve the mystery of the blue carbuncle, a story that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published in January 1892. A man named Peterson approached Holmes with a goose. On Christmas, Peterson's wife had found, inside the bird's throat, a blue gemstone that belonged to an important noblewoman. After a series of exasperating inquiries, Holmes learned the truth: the thief of the carbuncle fed it to the goose to get away, but a series of mishaps led the goose to be sold and passed along a long line of buyers. Glad to be done with the wild goose chase in time for Christmas, Holmes declined to press charges on the thief.

The story was published in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", Doyle's first stories about the celebrated sleuth.

Answer: 1621

Most Americans trace the first Thanksgiving to a feast held by the Pilgrims in 1621 in Massachusetts. The Pilgrims, who had fled Europe to seek religious toleration, didn't have the slightest idea how to obtain food in the New World, and were desperately reliant on the native Wampanoags for help. Due to a remarkable coincidence, one of the Wampanoags named Squanto had traveled to England and knew English, so he was a major help. Only two brief diary accounts, one by Plymouth leader William Bradford and the other by Edward Winslow, provide our knowledge about the first Thanksgiving. Much has been left to the imagination, though I daresay that there probably wasn't cranberry sauce or pecan pie. One food that might have been served, hypothesize historians, was pigeon. Passenger pigeons, now extinct in the wild, once swarmed the Eastern seaboard of the US and were probably consumed by the pilgrims.

The holiday became an annual celebration in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1660, and had spread to the individual colonies by the time of American independence.

Answer: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Of all the Thanksgiving-set movies, perhaps none is as cringe-worthy as John Hughes' 1987 comedy "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles". Poor family man Neal Page (Steve Martin) just wants to get home for the holidays, but after a series of unfortunate coincidences leaves him stranded in the Wichita airport, he takes drastic measures. Teaming up with the inattentive-to-hygiene, bad-in-social-situations shower-curtain-ring-salesman Del Griffith (John Candy), Neal struggles to make it home in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

The film was a critical and commercial success, and brought some accolades to director John Hughes, who was previously known only as a director of teenage angsty movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "The Breakfast Club". Hughes claimed the movie was based on one of his own miserable travel experiences.

Answer: Puerto Rico

A US commonwealth, Puerto Rico does celebrate Thanksgiving, though in a way somewhat different from the continental version. The turkey is roasted and stuffed with a plantain-based stuffing called mofongo. Side dishes include tostones and guineos en escabeche, two more dishes based on plantains, and morcilla, which is essentially blood pudding. For dessert, you might see dulce de leche, a very sweet milk-based custard, or tembleque, a custard made with cinnamon and coconut.

In Puerto Rico, Thanksgiving kicks off the Christmas season, which, as in many Latin American countries, lasts for several weeks and includes many other religious festivities. Puerto Ricans celebrate Christmas with a "parranda", the Latin American equivalent of caroling, except it's more urgent and it often lasts all night.

Answer: Turducken

Turducken, like alligator stuffing, is an idea that only could have come from the Cajuns in the United States, though the English had been stuffing birds inside of each other for years before people learned of the notorious turducken. It's simply a deboned chicken, stuffed into a deboned duck, stuffed into a deboned turkey, served with assorted stuffings and spices. Mainstream Americans first heard of the "delicacy" from none other than legendary NFL player, coach, and commentator John Madden. Madden would present the dish to the winning teams on the Thanksgiving games. The dish is considered gourmet, and though you can order one from specialty butchers, it'll cost you.

Still, it's better than the rumors of stuffed camel--reportedly, a Bedouin wedding feast wasn't complete without a dish consisting of camel stuffed with lamb, stuffed with chicken, stuffed with rice. Yum.

Answer: Latkes

For the first time since the early twentieth century, the Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, overlapped with Thanksgiving in the United States on November 28, 2013. The event happened because Hanukkah is tied to the notoriously confusing Jewish calendar (it adds a month seven out of every nineteen years) and because Thanksgiving fell at its latest possible date. People in the know say that the overlap won't happen again for more than fifty years.

Hanukkah is traditionally celebrated by consuming fried food, to celebrate the oil in the Temple's menorah burning for eight nights. Hence, a popular food is the latke, a fried potato pancake. It is entirely possible that the author of this quiz is not a big fan of latkes, and was disappointed to find them replacing mashed potatoes on his Thanksgiving plate.