French Food Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
98 free French Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
French cooking has rules, legends and lawsuits, and this quiz covers all three. The 98 questions run from the bakery (why the croissant is really Austrian, what a baguette may legally contain) through the great regional dishes (bouillabaisse in Marseille, cassoulet in Castelnaudary, coq au vin in Burgundy, ratatouille in Nice) to cheese, wine and spirits: Roquefort's caves, Camembert's wooden box, Comté's fruitières, the grapes of Champagne, the 1855 Bordeaux classification and how long Cognac must sit in oak. You will also meet the people who shaped the table: Carême and Escoffier, Brillat-Savarin, Julia Child, Paul Bocuse and the Michelin brothers who gave away a guide to sell tyres. Some questions any Francophile will get; others, like which mayor of Nice banned boiled potatoes from his salad or which year beef bourguignon was first written down, are there to settle arguments. It suits a dinner party, a Bastille Day quiz, a French class or a food-and-drink round at the pub. Every answer has been checked against a source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you answer.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year did UNESCO list the 'gastronomic meal of the French' as intangible heritage?
2010
UNESCO inscribed the 'gastronomic meal of the French' on its intangible cultural heritage list in November 2010; the listed meal runs aperitif, starter, main course, cheese and dessert, with matched wines.
Q 02Which chef divided the professional kitchen into stations with the 'brigade system'?
Auguste Escoffier
Auguste Escoffier organised the kitchen into stations under chefs de partie, the brigade de cuisine, while running the Savoy and Carlton kitchens in London; his Guide Culinaire appeared in 1903.
Q 03Escoffier created the dessert Peach Melba in 1893 in honour of an Australian who was what?
An opera singer
Nellie Melba also gave her name to Melba toast; Escoffier worked with hotelier César Ritz at the Savoy and Carlton in London.
Q 04The croissant descends from the kipferl, a crescent-shaped pastry from which country?
Austria
August Zang, an Austrian artillery officer, opened a Viennese bakery on the rue de Richelieu in Paris in 1838 or 1839.
Q 05Which four ingredients may a French 'baguette de tradition' contain?
Flour, water, yeast, salt
The 1993 'décret pain' limits a baguette de tradition française to wheat flour, water, yeast or sourdough, and salt, with no additives and no freezing at any stage of production.
Q 06About how long is a standard baguette?
65 cm
A standard baguette runs about 65 cm long and 5 to 6 cm across, weighing roughly 250 g; a thinner, shorter loaf is a ficelle, and some loaves are baked up to a metre long.
Q 07Bouillabaisse, the saffron fish stew, originated in which port city?
Marseille
Bouillabaisse comes from Marseille, where fishermen stewed the bony rockfish, such as rascasse, that they could not sell; local restaurateurs codified the recipe in a 1980 charter.
Q 08What is rouille, the sauce served with bouillabaisse?
A garlic and saffron mayonnaise
Rouille is a garlic and saffron mayonnaise, thickened with olive oil and often bread or egg yolk and sharpened with cayenne; its name means 'rust', for its orange colour.
Q 09Cassoulet takes its name from the cassole, which is what?
An earthenware cooking pot
The cassole is a deep, sloping earthenware cooking pot, traditionally thrown in the village of Issel near the Montagne Noire; beans and meats bake slowly in it until a crust forms.
Q 10Which town in the Aude department is regarded as the birthplace of cassoulet?
Castelnaudary
Castelnaudary claims cassoulet was born during a Hundred Years' War siege, when townsfolk pooled beans and meats into one pot; its Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet was founded in 1970.
Q 11Coq au vin is traditionally made with red wine from which region?
Burgundy
The classic coq au vin is braised in red Burgundy with lardons, mushrooms and pearl onions; Alsace makes a white version with Riesling and the Jura uses its vin jaune.
Q 12Ratatouille is a traditional dish of which French region?
Provence
The name comes from the Occitan ratatolha and the verb touiller, to stir; Pixar's 2007 film made it famous worldwide.
Q 13Which snail species is known as the Roman snail or escargot de Bourgogne?
Helix pomatia
Helix pomatia, the Roman snail or escargot de Bourgogne, is the large pale-shelled species classically served in garlic and parsley butter; its wild collection is restricted in France, so most are farmed or imported.
Q 21Which cheese received France's very first Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, in 1925?
Roquefort
Roquefort was protected by a law of 26 July 1925, the first French cheese appellation; the blue veins in the cheese come from the mould Penicillium roqueforti, traditionally grown on rye bread.
Q 22Camembert comes from which French region?
Normandy
Camembert is from the village of Camembert in Normandy's Orne department, where legend says farmer Marie Harel first made it in 1791; the round poplar box that let it travel was introduced in 1890.
Q 23Which French PDO cheese has the largest annual production, about 65,000 tonnes?
Comté
Comté, from the Jura massif, is France's biggest-volume PDO cheese, with output passing 60,000 tonnes a year; it is made in village cooperative dairies called fruitières from the Montbéliarde breed of cow and aged in large wheels.
Q 14A macaron shell is made from egg whites, sugar and which ground ingredient?
Almonds
Macaron shells are made from finely ground almonds, icing sugar and whipped egg whites, piped and rested so they bake with a smooth top and a ruffled 'foot'.
Q 15Which Paris pâtisserie is often credited with inventing the double-decker macaron?
Ladurée
Pierre Desfontaines of Ladurée usually gets the credit, though a baker named Claude Gerbet also claimed the invention.
Q 16Add a fried or poached egg on top of a croque monsieur and it becomes a croque what?
Madame
A croque madame is a croque monsieur topped with a fried or poached egg, said to resemble a lady's hat; the ham-and-cheese sandwich itself appeared on Paris café menus around 1910.
Q 17A traditional quiche Lorraine contains cream, eggs and bacon but NOT which ingredient often added today?
Gruyère cheese
The original quiche Lorraine was an open tart of eggs, cream and smoked bacon; Gruyère cheese is a later addition, and with cheese the dish is technically a quiche vosgienne.
Q 18Tarte Tatin, the upside-down caramelised apple tart, is named after two sisters who ran what?
A hotel
Stéphanie and Caroline Tatin's hotel was in Lamotte-Beuvron; the name was applied later by the food writer Curnonsky and Maxim's.
Q 19The earliest known recipe for crème brûlée appears in a cookbook by François Massialot from which year?
1691
François Massialot printed the first known crème brûlée recipe in 1691, in Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois; Trinity College, Cambridge later served a similar 'burnt cream' with its crest branded into the sugar.
Q 20The blue cheese aged in the Combalou caves of southern France is made from the milk of which animal?
Sheep
Only cheese aged in those caves may use the name, and the milk comes exclusively from Lacaune ewes.
Q 24Which three grapes make up nearly all Champagne?
Pinot noir, Pinot meunier, Chardonnay
Champagne is made almost entirely from Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay; the other permitted varieties, such as Arbane and Petit Meslier, cover well under one percent of the vineyard.
Q 25What is the muselet on a bottle of Champagne?
The wire cage over the cork
The muselet is the wire cage twisted over the cork, patented by Adolphe Jacquesson in 1844; it holds back roughly five to six atmospheres of pressure and is opened with six half-turns of the tab.
Q 26The Michelin Guide was first published in 1900 by a company that made what?
Tyres
André and Édouard Michelin, whose Clermont-Ferrand company made tyres, gave away nearly 35,000 copies of the 1900 guide to encourage motoring; restaurant stars only arrived in 1926.
Q 27In the Michelin Guide, three stars officially mean a restaurant is what?
Worth a special journey
Michelin's three stars mean 'exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey'; two stars are 'worth a detour' and one is 'very good cooking'; the three-tier hierarchy was adopted in 1931 and the Bib Gourmand in 1997.
Q 28Julia Child co-wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking with Simone Beck and which other Frenchwoman?
Louisette Bertholle
Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck had begun the book for American readers before Julia Child joined them in Paris; Knopf published volume one in 1961, and the 2009 film Julie & Julia returned it to the bestseller list.
Q 29Which of these is one of the five French mother sauces?
Velouté
Velouté, a light stock thickened with a blond roux, is one of Escoffier's five mother sauces alongside béchamel, espagnole, tomate and hollandaise; Carême's earlier list of four had allemande rather than tomate and hollandaise.
Q 30Béchamel sauce is made by thickening which liquid with a white roux?
Milk
Béchamel is milk whisked into a white roux of butter and flour and simmered until smooth, often infused with onion, bay and nutmeg; it is the base of a croque monsieur's topping and of sauce Mornay.