100 free Irish Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Irish food is a lot more than corned beef and cabbage, which, as one of these questions explains, is really an Irish-American invention. This quiz covers the real table: soda bread and wheaten bread, colcannon and champ, coddle, boxty, crubeens and drisheen, the Ulster fry, the barmbrack ring, and the modern classics of the chicken fillet roll and the spice bag. The drinks get their due too: Guinness's 9,000-year lease, why Irish whiskey is usually distilled three times, how Baileys was invented in a London office, and which airport gets credit for Irish coffee. The questions range from easy (what makes soda bread rise) to hard (what luncheon meat Waterford people call 'red lead', which potato variety failed in 1845, and where the Twirl bar was invented). It works for a St Patrick's Day party round, a pub quiz, or a classroom unit on Irish culture. Every answer has been checked against a source and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you answer.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Soda bread rises because baking soda reacts with the lactic acid in which ingredient?
Buttermilk
The reaction starts immediately, so bakers mix the dough as little as possible and never knead it.
Q 02What is soda bread made with raisins colloquially called in Ireland?
Spotted dog
The sweetened caraway-and-raisin version is now rare, while brown soda bread with smoked salmon came back via hotel menus in the 1960s.
Q 03In Ulster, the sweetened wholemeal variety of soda bread usually goes by what name?
Wheaten
Further south the same loaf is simply 'brown bread', and Ulster reserves 'soda bread' for the white savoury kind.
Q 04Colcannon is a traditional dish on St Patrick's Day and on the feast day of which other Irish saint?
St Brigid
The name likely comes from Irish words for a 'white-headed' cabbage, and the same root names the coot, a white-headed bird.
Q 05Champ is mashed potato mixed with butter, milk and which allium?
Scallions
In some areas it was made with stinging nettles instead, and 'as thick as champ' remains a Hiberno-English insult.
Q 06On Samhain, a dish of champ with a spoon was left for the fairies under which tree?
A hawthorn
It was also customary to make the dish with the first new potatoes of the harvest.
Q 07An old rhyme warns that if you can't make boxty, you'll never get a what?
Man
Boxty is a griddle-fried potato pancake most associated with Leitrim, Cavan, Fermanagh and the north midlands.
Q 08Whatever the recipe, every version of boxty contains what?
Finely grated raw potato
Boiled boxty, cooked like dumplings, is a Halloween tradition around Cavan and Leitrim.
Q 09Which layered stew of sausages, rashers, potato and onion was reputedly a favourite of Jonathan Swift?
Coddle
It is a Dublin dish through and through and turns up in James Joyce, and its pale, unbrowned look is a point of pride.
Q 10Enthusiasts of the Dublin sausage-and-rasher stew regard which step as an unacceptable cop-out?
Browning the sausages
The dish is braised gently in the stock from the meat, so everything stays pale, which is part of why outsiders find it off-putting.
Q 11Irish stew is traditionally made with root vegetables and which meat?
Lamb or mutton
Mutton was cheaper because sheep were kept for wool and milk, so only old animals reached the pot, and they needed hours of slow cooking.
Q 12Many food historians believe the original meat in Irish stew was which animal?
Goat
The cauldron replaced the spit as the main cooking tool of ancient Ireland, and the potato only joined the pot much later.
Q 13According to Irish stew purists, which of these ingredients spoils the true dish?
Carrots
The purist recipe is neck mutton chops or kid, potatoes, onions and water, simmered for up to two hours.
Q 21Which chocolate drink powder went into the very first Baileys prototype, mixed up in about 45 minutes?
Nesquik
The drink was launched in 1974 as the first Irish cream on the market, partly to use surplus cream from Express Dairies.
Q 22What is the declared alcohol content of Baileys Irish Cream?
17%
The cream and whiskey are held together as an emulsion with refined vegetable oil, and no preservatives are needed.
Q 23Ornua, the co-operative behind Kerrygold butter, takes its name from Irish words meaning what?
New gold
It was the Irish Dairy Board from 1961 until 2015, and Kerrygold was chosen to evoke farming, naturalness and Irishness.
Q 14Finding the ring in a Halloween barmbrack traditionally means what for the person who gets it?
They will marry within the year
The pea meant no wedding that year, the stick a quarrelsome marriage, and the coin riches; today's shop-bought bracks keep only a toy ring.
Q 15What does 'bairín breac', the Irish name behind barmbrack, literally mean?
Speckled loaf
The speckles are the sultanas and raisins, which most recipes soak overnight in cold tea or whiskey first.
Q 16Chef Joe Sheridan invented Irish coffee in the early 1940s at which flying-boat terminal?
Foynes
The terminal on the Shannon estuary was about 15 km from today's Shannon Airport, and he later emigrated to serve the drink in San Francisco.
Q 17Which San Francisco bar began serving Irish coffee in 1952 after a travel writer brought the idea home?
Buena Vista Cafe
Stanton Delaplane of the San Francisco Chronicle had drunk it at Shannon and worked with the cafe to recreate it.
Q 18What was the first flavour of Tayto crisps, said to be the world's first seasoned crisp, in 1954?
Cheese & Onion
Founder Joe 'Spud' Murphy's process was so novel that companies around the world sought to buy the rights; Salt & Vinegar followed in 1966.
Q 19Tayto's visitor attraction near Ashbourne, opened in 2010, was renamed what in 2023?
Emerald Park
The Republic's Tayto and Northern Ireland's Tayto are entirely separate companies sharing a name and mascot under licence.
Q 20Baileys took its name from what?
A restaurant beneath its creators' London office
Bailey's Bistro sat under the team's office in Greek Street, Soho; the R. A. Bailey signature on the label is fictional.
Q 24In which country was the Kerrygold brand first test-launched in October 1962?
England
The test was in the Winterhill area of the north-west; Germany followed after Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 and had national distribution there by 1982.
Q 25The Limerick dish 'packet and tripe' pairs tripe with which gelatinous pudding?
Drisheen
It was sometimes flavoured with tansy before that herb was found to be toxic, and it appears in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Q 26What are crubeens?
Boiled pigs' trotters
They were rural pub food eaten by hand like corn on the cob, and their saltiness conveniently made drinkers thirstier.
Q 27The blaa, a soft square white roll dusted with flour, is a speciality of which Irish city?
Waterford
It won EU Protected Geographical Indication status in 2013, and just four bakeries sell about 12,000 of them a day.
Q 28A blaa is often filled with a luncheon meat that locals nickname what?
Red lead
The breakfast blaa with egg, rasher and sausage outsells the breakfast roll in its home city.
Q 29Which takeaway dish did staff at Templeogue's Sunflower restaurant create off-menu around 2006?
Spice bag
Salt-and-chilli chips and chicken with peppers in a paper bag was voted Ireland's favourite takeaway dish in 2020.
Q 30Ireland's favourite deli food, sold in every petrol station, is a baguette filled with what?
A breaded chicken fillet
It has been declared Ireland's favourite deli food, is sold in petrol stations everywhere, and comes with taco sauce if you know what you are doing.