Soul Food Trivia
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41 free Soul Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This soul food trivia quiz covers the food and the story behind it. There are questions on where okra, black-eyed peas and rice came from, why enslaved cooks used every part of the hog, what pot liquor is, and why Hoppin' John and greens go on the table every New Year's Day. It also covers the cooks and places that made the cuisine famous: Sylvia's in Harlem, Paschal's in Atlanta, Dooky Chase in New Orleans, Edna Lewis, and the earliest cookbooks by Black authors. You will also find the term itself, which only took hold in the 1960s, the red foods of Juneteenth, the difference between soul food and Southern food, and a few questions on the 1997 film Soul Food. About a third are easy for anyone who has eaten a Sunday dinner, a third are medium, and the rest are for cooks and food historians. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and the historians it cites, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 41 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When 'soul food' spread in the 1960s, what did the word 'soul' describe?
Black culture
Black culture: yet English had joined the two words centuries earlier, using soul food for whatever nourishes the soul.
Q 02One of the earliest written uses of the term 'soul food' appears in which 1965 book?
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The poet LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, also published an essay titled 'Soul Food' that argued for the cuisine as part of Black identity.
Q 03Under what earlier name did Amiri Baraka publish the article 'Soul Food'?
LeRoi Jones
LeRoi Jones was the name Amiri Baraka wrote under before changing his name; his essay 'Soul Food' answered a claim that Black Americans had no cuisine of their own.
Q 04Freda DeKnight, author of the 1948 cookbook A Date with a Dish, was the first food editor of which magazine?
Ebony
Ebony: later editions of A Date with a Dish were even renamed The Ebony Cookbook.
Q 05Per historian Adrian Miller, Black cooks distinguish their corn bread from white Southern versions by adding what?
Sugar
White Southerners, Miller notes, say that once you put sugar in cornbread it becomes cake.
Q 06Which dessert did the Nation of Islam promote while rejecting soul food dishes?
Bean pie
Bean pie: Elijah Muhammad's How to Eat to Live shunned larger beans but praised the small navy bean, the pie's main filling.
Q 07By tradition, enslaved African women smuggled seeds to the Americas by hiding them where?
In their braided hair
In their braided hair, oral tradition holds: the women hid seeds against an unknown future, hoping they could someday be planted in the new land.
Q 08Which African bird, brought to the Americas via the slave trade, fed enslaved people on plantations?
Guinea fowl
Guinea fowl were carried from Africa to the West Indies, and many people keep the birds because they eat ticks.
Q 09Frederick Douglass wrote that enslaved men and women got eight pounds of pork a month, or its equivalent in what?
Fish
Fish: slaves sent to fetch the allowance sang wild songs on the way, and Douglass wrote that such singing showed sorrow, not contentment.
Q 10Which African American holiday, created in 1966, includes a communal feast called the Karamu?
Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa: Maulana Karenga created it after the 1965 Watts riots, drawing on African harvest festivals, and its Karamu feast usually falls on December 31.
Q 11What did archaeological digs of slave cabins suggest about enslaved people's meals?
They were mostly stews and one-pot dishes
They were mostly stews and one-pot dishes: cabins held more bowls than flatware, while planter households left more plates, pointing to separate cuts of meat.
Q 12Which enslaved man in George Washington's household was allowed to sell kitchen leftovers for his own money?
Hercules Posey
Hercules Posey sold the presidential kitchen's leftovers in Philadelphia, then escaped from Mount Vernon on February 22, 1797, Washington's 65th birthday.
Q 13Chitterlings are which part of the pig?
The intestines
Q 21Which pancake brand, long criticized as a racist 'mammy' stereotype, was renamed Pearl Milling Company in 2021?
Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima: the new name revives the Pearl Milling Company, the 1880s business that created the original ready-made pancake mix.
Q 22Which American tradition made waffles with chicken and gravy a common Sunday supper by the 1860s?
Pennsylvania Dutch
Pennsylvania Dutch: hotels later sold chicken-and-waffle dinners to tourists, making the dish a reason to visit the region.
Q 23Cracklins, stirred into crackling bread, are fried pieces of what?
Pork skin
Pork skin: cracklins are the crisp bits left when skin and fat are rendered into lard, so lard-making also gave cooks the crunch for crackling bread.
The intestines: enslaved people were often left such scraps while owners kept the better cuts, yet chitterlings are eaten in Europe too, as in France's andouillette sausage.
Q 14What is 'pot liquor'?
The liquid left after boiling greens
The liquid left after boiling greens is pot liquor, or pot likker; the vitamins that leach out of slow-cooked collards end up in it, so it was drunk from the pot or sopped up with bread.
Q 15Which pie is the traditional soul food holiday dessert, in place of pumpkin pie?
Sweet potato pie
Sweet potato pie: enslaved Africans likely used the American sweet potato in place of the yams of their homeland, and the two tubers became interchangeable in Southern cooking.
Q 16Eating Hoppin' John with collard greens on which holiday is believed to bring prosperity?
New Year's Day
New Year's Day is the traditional date: the collard greens stand for paper money, and some families slip a coin under the dishes for luck.
Q 17Southern field peas such as crowder peas belong to which Old World plant domesticated in Africa?
The cowpea
The cowpea, Vigna unguiculata, was domesticated in Africa, and a deep taproot makes it so drought-tolerant that it can yield a crop with little rain.
Q 18What job does okra do in a pot of gumbo?
Thicken the broth
Thicken the broth: okra reached Louisiana through the slave trade, yet gumbos thickened with filé powder traditionally leave the okra out.
Q 19Botanically, collard greens share one plant species with which common vegetables?
Cabbage and broccoli
Cabbage and broccoli: farmers bred one wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, into collards, cabbage, broccoli, kale and cauliflower, some so changed they barely look related.
Q 20Hominy is corn treated with an alkali in a process called what?
Nixtamalization
Nixtamalization, a Mesoamerican technique, soaks corn in lime or lye, a step that helps protect people who live on corn from the deficiency disease pellagra.
Q 24Which mid-20th-century seasoned salt is a staple in Black American kitchens?
Lawry's
Lawry's seasoned salt reached grocery stores in 1938, and since one shaker mixes salt with paprika, turmeric, onion and garlic, many Black home cooks use it on nearly everything but desserts.
Q 25Rufus Estes, author of the 1911 cookbook Good Things to Eat, had worked for which company?
The Pullman railway car service
The Pullman railway car service hired Estes in 1883, and he ran private railroad cars for travellers including Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland.
Q 26Sylvia Woods bought the Harlem luncheonette that became Sylvia's with money borrowed from whom?
Her mother
Her mother: Woods had spent years waiting tables at that same luncheonette before its owner offered to sell it to her in 1962.
Q 27Which Atlanta soul food restaurant did Martin Luther King Jr. use to eat, meet, plan and strategize?
Paschal's
Paschal's, the restaurant the Paschal brothers opened on Hunter Street, fed and hosted King and the SCLC as they planned campaigns; Georgia Gilmore's Montgomery kitchen played a similar role during the bus boycott.
Q 28What is the New Orleans restaurant of the 'Queen of Creole Cuisine', a civil-rights-era meeting place, called?
Dooky Chase
Dooky Chase: Leah Chase invited activists into its upstairs dining room, and Martin Luther King Jr. joined their strategy sessions over meals in the 1960s.
Q 29Edna Lewis wove memories of her childhood in Freetown, Virginia, into which 1976 cookbook?
The Taste of Country Cooking
The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976, is arranged by season around Freetown, the Virginia community founded by freed people, her grandfather among them.
Q 30What is Jessica B. Harris's 2011 book on African-American food, later a Netflix docuseries, titled?
High on the Hog
High on the Hog: the series adaptation opens in Benin, where Harris and host Stephen Satterfield tour the country's markets.