Caribbean Food
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
49 free Caribbean Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Caribbean cooking is what a dozen cultures made of the same islands: Taino barbacoa and cassava, West African okra and one-pot rice, Spanish sofrito, British saltfish, Indian curry and roti, Chinese woks, all seasoned with the Scotch bonnet. Every island has a national dish it will argue about, from Jamaica's ackee and saltfish to Barbados's cou-cou and flying fish and Grenada's oil down. These 49 questions cover the signature dishes and their stories: jerk's Taino and Maroon origins, the ackee that Captain Bligh carried to Kew and the breadfruit he brought back, doubles invented in Princes Town in 1936, mofongo in its wooden pilon, callaloo's Kimbundu name, Guyanese pepperpot preserved by cassareep, bake and shark on Maracas beach and the roti wrap from San Fernando. There are questions on rum's plantation birth, the pina colada's rival bartenders, the Cuban sandwich rivalry between Tampa and Miami, Jamaican patties and coco bread, rice and peas, conch fritters and the goat stew that Montserrat made its national dish. Easy questions cover ingredients and islands; the hardest ask about names 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which staple crop did Indigenous Caribbean peoples cultivate before European colonisation?
Cassava
Cassava is poisonous raw: most varieties carry cyanide compounds, so islanders grated, pressed and heated the root to make it safe before baking it into flatbread.
Q 02Which fried base of onions, garlic and peppers starts countless Cuban stews, beans and rice dishes?
Sofrito
Sofrito goes into the pot first, as the foundation of dishes such as ropa vieja; Cuban cooks build it on bell peppers and often the small sweet chilli called ají cachucha.
Q 03Goat water, a stew said to descend from Irish stew, is the national dish of which Caribbean island?
Montserrat
Montserrat is known as the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean for its many early settlers from Ireland, and its tourist board insists that true goat water is made with a male goat.
Q 04Sorrel, the spiced red drink of a Jamaican Christmas, is brewed from which plant?
Hibiscus
Hibiscus: the drink is steeped from the red sepals of roselle, a hibiscus that reached the Caribbean with enslaved Africans, and it is often laced with rum.
Q 05Black cake, served on special occasions, derives from which English dessert?
Christmas pudding
Christmas pudding was remade in the islands with rum and a bittersweet dark syrup called browning, which turns the cake almost black; bakers may soak the fruit for months beforehand.
Q 06On Caribbean plantations, what were the plots where enslaved people grew their own food called?
Provision grounds
Provision grounds spared planters the cost of feeding the people they enslaved, but growers also sold their surplus at market, and those skills became the basis of free peasant farming after emancipation.
Q 07Jerk cooking originated with which indigenous Jamaican peoples?
The Arawak and Taino
The Arawak and Taino cured meat with native peppers over a slow fire; Africans who escaped slavery, the Maroons, learned the method from them and kept it alive in the mountains, hunting wild hogs.
Q 08Which two ingredients are the main components of jerk seasoning?
Allspice and Scotch bonnet
Allspice and Scotch bonnet do different jobs: the first is a single dried berry, named because it tastes like cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg at once, and the second brings the fire.
Q 09The word 'jerk' is said to derive from which Quechua-origin Spanish term?
Charqui
Charqui, from the Quechua for dried meat, travelled north with the Spanish and entered English twice: as the verb 'jerk', to dry meat in strips, by 1707, and as 'jerky' in 1850.
Q 10Which Indigenous Caribbean word for a raised wooden frame for smoking meat passed through Spanish into English?
Barbacoa
Barbacoa first meant the frame itself, which islanders also slept on; English had 'barbecue' by the late 1600s, and only later did the word come to mean the grill, the food and the party.
Q 11What wood is traditionally used to smoke jerked meat?
Pimento
Pimento, in Jamaica, is a tree rather than the red pepper stuffed into olives: early Spanish explorers mistook its dried berries for peppercorns, and the name passed to the tree and its wood.
Q 12What is Jamaica's national dish?
Ackee and saltfish
Ackee and saltfish joins two imports, neither native to Jamaica: a West African fruit and cod salted in the North Atlantic, a pairing made by the trade routes of the slavery era.
Q 13Ackee, the red-podded Caribbean fruit with glossy black seeds, belongs to the same plant family as which fruit?
Lychee
Lychee and ackee are both soapberries, but only ackee goes in the frying pan: its pale flesh is cooked like a vegetable, and visitors often mistake it for scrambled eggs.
Q 21Trinidadian doubles consist of curried chickpeas on what?
Two fried flatbreads
Two fried flatbreads, called bara, give the snack its name: Emamool Deen first sold his curried chickpeas on a single one in the 1930s, until customers kept asking him to double it.
Q 22Mofongo is a Puerto Rican dish built around which ingredient?
Plantains
Plantains are mashed with garlic and pork crackling, a method that crossed the Atlantic from Africa; sister dishes are called fufu in Cuba and mangú in the Dominican Republic.
Q 23What is the wooden mortar and pestle used to make mofongo called?
Pilon
Pilon is a Spanish word for a mortar, and in this tall wooden one the cook pounds garlic, pork crackling and the cooked starch together by hand.
Q 14Haitians eat soup joumou, a rich squash soup, every New Year's Day to celebrate what?
Independence from France
Independence from France was declared on 1 January 1804. Under colonial rule the soup was a dish for slaveholders, though enslaved people grew the squash and cooked it, so eating it became a mark of freedom.
Q 15Why are there restrictions on importing ackee into the United States?
Parts of the fruit are toxic
Parts of the fruit are toxic: unripe flesh, seeds and rind hold hypoglycin A, so pickers wait until the pod splits open by itself, and US rules admit only packers shown to use ripe fruit.
Q 16What is a Jamaican patty traditionally tucked into to make a full meal?
Coco bread
Coco bread is a soft, faintly sweet bun made with coconut milk and folded before baking so it opens like a pocket; a hot patty goes inside, pastry and all.
Q 17Which British bake influenced the Jamaican patty?
The Cornish pasty
The Cornish pasty arrived with British colonists and met the Spanish empanada already on the island; Jamaican cooks made the half-moon pie their own with a hot, curry-spiced filling.
Q 18Which community, many descended from 19th-century indentured labourers, founded the Jamaican patty chains Tastee and Juici Patties?
Chinese Jamaicans
Chinese Jamaicans turned a bakery snack into fast food: Vincent Chang opened the first Tastee shop in 1966, and Jukie Chin began selling his Juici patties while still a teenager.
Q 19In Trinidad and Tobago, callaloo is made from the leaves of which plant?
Taro (dasheen)
Taro (dasheen) leaves, sold as dasheen bush, are simmered with pumpkin and coconut milk until soft, then blended into a thick green soup.
Q 20Which aromatic bitters, dashed into cocktails around the world, have been made in Trinidad since the 1870s?
Angostura
Angostura bitters are named after a town in Venezuela, now Ciudad Bolívar, where a doctor in Simón Bolívar's army first made them in 1824; his family later moved the business to Port of Spain.
Q 24Cou-cou is made mainly from cornmeal and which vegetable?
Okra
Okra is boiled first and its slippery cooking water goes into the pot with the cornmeal, which is then worked smooth with a flat wooden cou-cou stick shaped like a small cricket bat.
Q 25Cou-cou and what make up the national dish of Barbados?
Flying fish
Flying fish matter so much to Barbados that when the shoals shifted south towards Tobago, Bajan boats followed them, and the row over fishing rights ended before an international tribunal in 2006.
Q 26Curaçao liqueur, often dyed bright blue, takes its flavour from the dried peel of which fruit?
Orange
Orange trees planted on Curaçao by the Spanish in the 1500s bore fruit too bitter to eat in the dry climate and were left to grow wild, until islanders found that the sun-dried peel was richly fragrant.
Q 27The Scotch bonnet pepper is named for its likeness to which piece of headwear?
A tam o' shanter
A tam o' shanter is Scotland's flat woollen bonnet, named in its turn after the hero of a Robert Burns poem; the squat pepper has the same shape.
Q 28Which Caribbean destination claims the piña colada as its own and made it its official drink in 1978?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico made it official in 1978, yet nobody can say for certain who mixed the first one: several San Juan bartenders have claimed the credit.
Q 29What does pina colada literally mean?
Strained pineapple
Strained pineapple is the literal Spanish, after the pressed and strained juice at the drink's heart; the name was already in print in the 1920s, some thirty years before the modern recipe.
Q 30Which hotel claims bartender Ramon 'Monchito' Marrero invented the pina colada in 1954?
Caribe Hilton
It began as a milkshake-style drink; rum was added for adult guests.