Cajun and Creole Food
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48 free Cajun and Creole Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cajun and Creole are the two great cuisines of Louisiana, and locals will tell you they are not the same thing. Creole is the city food of New Orleans, born among French and Spanish colonists, Africans and Caribbeans before the Louisiana Purchase; Cajun is the country food of the Acadians expelled from Canada, who learned okra from enslaved cooks and file from the Choctaw and cooked everything in one pot. Both start with a roux and the holy trinity of onion, celery and bell pepper. These 48 questions cover the dishes: gumbo and its West African name, red and brown jambalaya, etouffee, boudin, andouille and tasso, dirty rice, red beans and rice, shrimp creole, oysters Rockefeller, Bananas Foster, beignets, king cake, po' boys and muffulettas. There are questions on the Sazerac and Tabasco, the crawfish boil and the boucherie, the courir de Mardi Gras, Paul Prudhomme's blackened redfish and the turducken, and the 1900 Picayune Creole Cook Book. Easy questions cover the trinity and the classics; the hardest ask about parishes, restaurants and dates. Every answer is cited to the page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which three vegetables make up the Cajun 'holy trinity'?
Onion, celery and bell pepper
Onion, celery and bell pepper, with the pepper standing in for the carrot of French mirepoix. The trio is centuries old in Louisiana pots, but the 'holy trinity' nickname only caught on around 1980.
Q 02The Cajuns descend from French colonists deported by the British from which region?
Acadia
Acadia, the French colony in what is now Nova Scotia and its neighbours. 'Cajun' is simply 'Acadian' worn down by generations of Louisiana speech.
Q 03The word gumbo most likely comes from an African word for which vegetable?
Okra
Okra. The Bantu word, close to ngombo, crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans, and in parts of the South 'gumbo' is still another name for the vegetable itself.
Q 04On which day of the week is red beans and rice traditionally cooked in New Orleans?
Monday
Monday. It was washday, so a pot of beans seasoned with the bone from Sunday's ham could simmer untended while the laundry was scrubbed.
Q 05File powder is ground from the leaves of which tree, once root beer's main flavouring?
Sassafras
Sassafras. Choctaw cooks were grinding its dried leaves long before Louisiana kitchens borrowed them, and the French name is a warning: file means 'spun into threads', which is what it does if boiled.
Q 06What do Cajun cooks do with a roux that shows black specks?
Start again
Start again. A dark roux can take 45 minutes of constant stirring, but even a few scorched specks would spoil the whole pot, so there is no rescuing it.
Q 07A classic Creole roux is often built on which fat that Cajun cooks traditionally leave out?
Butter
Butter. Creole cooks had easy access to it, while Cajun cooks made do with oil or lard, which also survive the long, hot stirring a dark roux needs without scorching.
Q 08Gumbo z'herbes, the 'green gumbo' made from a potful of leafy greens, is traditionally eaten during which season?
Lent
Lent. With meat off the table for Catholics, cooks boiled down turnip tops, mustard greens, spinach and whatever else was growing into a thick green pot instead.
Q 09What is boudin?
A pork and rice sausage
A pork and rice sausage, sometimes called 'dirty rice in a casing'. Many fans never eat the casing at all: they squeeze the soft filling straight into their mouths.
Q 10What is added to make boudin rouge?
Pork blood
Pork blood. Strict rules on processing fresh blood have made boudin rouge a rarity, so nearly all the boudin sold today is the bloodless white kind.
Q 11What is tasso?
Smoked seasoned pork shoulder
Smoked seasoned pork shoulder. Fiery with cayenne, it is seldom eaten on its own: Cajun cooks dice it to flavour pots of beans, gumbo and jambalaya.
Q 12Andouille sausage is a speciality of a stretch of the Mississippi above New Orleans named for which settlers?
German
German. Germans farmed the 'German Coast' from the colony's early days, paddling their surplus downriver in pirogues to stock the markets of New Orleans.
Q 13What are gratons?
Fried pork cracklings
Fried pork cracklings. They began as a by-product: skin and fat were boiled down for lard, and the crisp, peppery scraps left in the pot became the snack.
Q 21The K in K-Paul's, Paul Prudhomme's famous New Orleans restaurant, stood for whom?
His wife
His wife, K Hinrichs, who gave the place its initial. It took no reservations or credit cards, yet was an instant hit, with lines stretching down the block.
Q 22Which NFL broadcaster made the turducken a Thanksgiving TV fixture?
John Madden
John Madden. Handed his first one in the booth at a Saints game with no plate or cutlery, he ate the three-bird roast with his hands, then took to ordering them for his crew at Thanksgiving.
Q 23Viet-Cajun crawfish restaurants began opening around 2000 in which Texas city?
Houston
Houston. Vietnamese families who had settled along the Gulf opened crawfish houses there and added a step no Louisiana boil had: tossing the cooked shellfish in a garlicky sauce.
Q 14Chaudin, or ponce, is a stuffed and smoked what?
Pig's stomach
Pig's stomach. Butchers pack it with sausage meat and tie it shut into a small cushion, which is braised in gravy and carved into slices like a roast.
Q 15Which Cajun dish is a popular 'smothered' preparation of crawfish or shrimp?
Etouffee
Etouffee. Unlike gumbo, it is often built on a pale 'blond' roux cooked for only a few minutes, which keeps the sauce light in colour and almost sweet.
Q 16Creole 'red' jambalaya gets its colour from which ingredient that Cajun 'brown' jambalaya leaves out?
Tomatoes
Tomatoes. They were easy to come by around New Orleans but scarcer out in Cajun country, where the pot takes its brown colour from meat seared hard at the start instead.
Q 17Which country star wrote and recorded the 1952 hit 'Jambalaya (On the Bayou)', a roll-call of Louisiana dishes?
Hank Williams
Hank Williams. His chorus of jambalaya, crawfish pie and file gumbo has been covered by everyone from Fats Domino to the Carpenters, carrying Louisiana cooking around the world.
Q 18Jambalaya is related to which West African dish?
Jollof
Jollof. Enslaved West Africans, many taken from rice-growing regions for their skill, cooked the one-pot rice they knew in Louisiana; Spanish paella is jambalaya's other famous cousin.
Q 19Which chef succeeded Paul Prudhomme at the stoves of Commander's Palace in New Orleans?
Emeril Lagasse
Emeril Lagasse. The future face of New Orleans cooking is a Massachusetts native who turned down a music-college scholarship as a percussionist to go to cooking school instead.
Q 20Which cooking technique, often taken for traditional Cajun, did Paul Prudhomme actually invent?
Blackening
Blackening. His peppery blackened redfish set off such a craze in the 1980s that the fish was badly overfished and Louisiana banned commercial catches of it.
Q 24At a crawfish boil, newcomers are jokingly warned off eating which crawfish?
The ones with straight tails
The ones with straight tails, said to have been dead before they hit the pot. LSU researchers who tested the lore found dead and live crawfish curl alike; a straight tail may just mean a crowded pot.
Q 25What is a boucherie?
A communal hog slaughter and feast
A communal hog slaughter and feast. Before refrigeration no family could eat a whole hog before it spoiled, so neighbours shared the work and each went home with fresh cuts and boudin.
Q 26What does cochon de lait mean?
Suckling pig
Suckling pig, literally a 'milk pig' not yet weaned. In Louisiana the phrase also names the party thrown to roast one, and whole towns build festivals around it.
Q 27In the rural Courir de Mardi Gras, what do householders traditionally throw to the maskers?
A live chicken
A live chicken. The costumed riders have to chase it down themselves, and by evening it is in the communal gumbo that feeds everyone who gave.
Q 28Which nut replaced the almonds of French pralines when the sweet reached New Orleans?
Pecans
Pecans. The trees were plentiful in Louisiana, and after emancipation Black women known as pralinieres made a living selling the candy from baskets on the city's streets.
Q 29Creole cuisine is stereotyped as what kind of cooking, compared with Cajun?
City food
City food. Creole cooks in New Orleans had a port's imported ingredients to hand, while Cajun cooking was the 'country food' of families who hunted, fished and grew what went in the pot.
Q 30What kind of business published The Picayune Creole Cook Book in 1900?
Newspaper
Newspaper. The Daily Picayune feared Creole recipes were 'fast disappearing' along with the last of the old Black cooks who knew them, and set out to get them into print.