70 free Hard Food and Drink trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This is the hard food and drink trivia quiz. If you already know that saffron comes from a crocus, that Champagne must come from Champagne and that a Negroni has gin in it, these 70 questions go further: who first identified umami, why haggis is banned in the United States, which cheese is deliberately full of live maggots, the tyre company behind the world's most famous restaurant guide, and the cowboy-era pharmacist whose name is on every chilli-heat chart. The drink half is just as tough: the count who invented the Negroni, the airbase where Irish coffee was born, the 1976 tasting that humiliated French judges, the ration the Royal Navy abolished on Black Tot Day, the insects that once coloured Campari, and the mood drug that used to be in 7 Up. Expect food science, forbidden delicacies, dish origins, cocktails, wine, beer, spirits, coffee and soft drinks in roughly equal measure. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopedic source before publishing and each question carries its citation. If you want a warm-up, start with our main food and drink trivia quiz and come back for this one.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Japanese chemist identified umami as a distinct taste in 1908 and co-founded Ajinomoto?
Kikunae Ikeda
He traced the taste to glutamic acid; the company's first product was monosodium glutamate, launched in 1909.
Q 02Which USDA chemist established the mechanism of the Maillard browning reaction in 1953?
John E. Hodge
Louis Camille Maillard had first described the reaction between amino acids and sugars four decades earlier while trying to reproduce protein synthesis.
Q 03Saffron's golden colour comes from which carotenoid pigment?
Crocin
Safranal supplies the aroma and picrocrocin the taste. The ISO 3632 grading standard measures all three in the dried stigmas.
Q 04Casu martzu, the Sardinian cheese containing live maggots, is made from which animal's milk?
Sheep
Larvae of the cheese fly are introduced to pecorino, and their digestion softens it until a liquid called làgrima, or teardrop, seeps out.
Q 05Fresh meat of the shark used for Iceland's hákarl is poisonous because of its high content of what?
Urea
The Greenland shark is buried under gravel for weeks to press the fluids out, then hung to dry for four or five months.
Q 06Roughly how many copies of the first, free Michelin Guide were distributed to French motorists in 1900?
35,000
There were fewer than 3,000 cars in France at the time; the Michelin brothers hoped more driving would wear out more tyres.
Q 07Since what year has 'Worcestershire' been a generic sauce name, after a court denied Lea & Perrins a trademark?
1876
The two Worcester chemists had commercialised their fermented anchovy sauce in 1837, claiming a nobleman's recipe from India.
Q 08On which 1924 date was Caesar salad created in Tijuana, when a holiday rush emptied the kitchen?
The Fourth of July
Caesar Cardini ran the restaurant across the border to serve Americans dodging Prohibition, and tossed the salad theatrically at the table.
Q 09On an ice sculpture of which animal did Escoffier first serve the dessert that became Peach Melba?
A swan
The soprano was performing Wagner's Lohengrin at Covent Garden, and the dish was originally called Pêche au cygne. Raspberry sauce came later.
Q 10Nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio Anaya at the Victory Club in which Mexican border city?
Piedras Negras
A group of US Army officers' wives from Fort Duncan arrived after the cook had gone, so the maître d' improvised with fried tortillas, cheese and jalapeños.
Q 11Under EU law, cheese may only be called Roquefort if it is aged in the natural caves of which mountain?
Combalou
Legend says a shepherd abandoned his lunch in a cave to chase a girl and returned months later to find Penicillium roqueforti had done its work.
Q 12Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal in the United States under a 1938 law banning candy that contains what?
A non-nutritive object
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act forbids trinkets embedded in confectionery. In 1997 regulators also ruled the toys had small parts.
Q 13Importing traditional haggis to the US has been illegal since 1971 due to a ban on food containing what?
Sheep lung
Q 21Swedish surströmming is traditionally released for sale on the third Thursday of which month?
August
A 1940s royal ordinance banned selling the year's fermented Baltic herring before that date; the law is gone but the 'premiere' survives.
Q 22Fugu's poison, tetrodotoxin, kills by doing what?
Blocking sodium channels so the muscles are paralysed
Victims stay fully conscious and die of asphyxiation; there is no antidote. Farmers can now raise poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from toxin-carrying bacteria.
Q 23Pule, reportedly the world's most expensive cheese, is made in Serbia mostly from which milk?
Donkey
Lung makes up 10 to 15 percent of the traditional recipe. The separate ban on British lamb was lifted in 2022, but the lung rule remained.
Q 14Wilbur Scoville, whose 1912 test gave us the chilli-heat scale, worked in which profession?
Pharmacist
His organoleptic test relied on trained tasters diluting extracts until the heat disappeared; today labs use chromatography instead.
Q 15Variations in which gene make coriander (cilantro) taste soapy to some people?
OR6A2
Surveys found about 21 percent of East Asians and 17 percent of Caucasians dislike the herb, versus only 3 percent of Middle Eastern respondents.
Q 16The true nutmeg tree is native to, and its spice mainly produced in, which island group?
The Banda Islands
The same fruit yields mace from the seed covering. Nutmeg's essential oil contains myristicin, which is toxic in large doses.
Q 17Under what brand name did Momofuku Ando launch the world's first instant noodles in 1958?
Chikin Ramen
Nissin's Cup Noodles did not arrive until 1971. The wavy-noodle curving process had been invented separately by Yoshio Murata in 1953.
Q 18Tabasco sauce has been made since 1868 on which Louisiana island?
Avery
Edmund McIlhenny was a former banker from Maryland. Historians note a New Orleans politician, Maunsel White, was bottling a tabasco pepper sauce two decades earlier.
Q 19A cookie like the modern fortune cookie was being made in the 19th century in which city?
Kyoto
The Japanese tsujiura senbei used sesame and miso. Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden is credited with serving the US version in the early 1900s.
Q 20Before Escoffier's five mother sauces, which chef described four 'grandes sauces' in 1833?
Marie-Antoine Carême
Escoffier's sauce tomate, one of his five, was built on salted pork belly, mirepoix, thyme and white stock.
Only about 100 Balkan jennies are milked for it, and it takes 25 litres of milk to make a single kilogram at the Zasavica reserve.
Q 24Which food technologist developed Vegemite in 1922 from yeast that breweries were throwing away?
Cyril Callister
British Marmite imports had been disrupted after the First World War. Vegemite finally reached shops on 25 October 1923.
Q 25Which Neapolitan pizzaiolo reportedly created the pizza Margherita for the queen in June 1889?
Raffaele Esposito
Of three pizzas he made, Queen Margherita preferred the one in the colours of the flag: tomato, mozzarella and basil.
Q 26Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1962 by Sam Panopoulos in which country?
Canada
The Greek-born restaurateur in Chatham, Ontario named it after the tinned pineapple brand he used, not the US state.
Q 27The West African miracle berry makes sour food taste sweet thanks to which glycoprotein?
Miraculin
The molecule binds to taste buds and only switches on the sweet receptors at low pH, so lemons taste like lemonade for up to half an hour.
Q 28The prized white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is most famously found around Alba in which Italian region?
Piedmont
The black Périgord truffle is the second most valuable species and grows with oaks and hazelnuts; its genome was sequenced in 2010.
Q 29Count Negroni created his 1919 cocktail by swapping which Americano ingredient for gin?
Soda water
Bartender Fosco Scarselli at Caffè Casoni also swapped the lemon garnish for orange to mark the new drink.
Q 30Around 1870 the base spirit of the Sazerac cocktail switched from cognac to rye whiskey. Why?
The Great French Wine Blight
Phylloxera had devastated France's vineyards. After the 1912 US absinthe ban, the locally made Herbsaint stood in for absinthe.