Soup Trivia
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48 free Soup trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Soup trivia questions with answers. Soup is the oldest cooked food there is, and it turns out to be excellent quiz material. These 48 questions travel from Marseille to Yokohama by way of Kyiv, Andalusia, Hanoi and a New Jersey cannery, asking what the word actually means, why ramen noodles are yellow, and what a bird's nest is really made of. The quiz covers technique as well as geography: how Escoffier divided the whole category in two, what clarifies a consommé, why Manhattan clam chowder is an insult in New England, and how a Polish king in exile got onion soup onto the table at Versailles. Every answer was checked against a primary reference before publication, so the dates, origins and prices here are accurate rather than restaurant folklore. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few questions that will only fall to someone who reads cookbooks for pleasure.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which thick Córdoban purée of tomato, olive oil and garlic is topped with jamón serrano?
Salmorejo
Salmorejo leaves out the cucumber and peppers that go into gazpacho, and its olive oil is blended in little by little until the soup becomes a thick, creamy emulsion.
Q 02In Old French, what did 'soupe' originally mean?
Bread soaked in liquid
Bread soaked in liquid was the soupe itself, and the Old French verb for eating the evening meal, which gave English 'supper', probably grew from the same word.
Q 03How did the French chef Auguste Escoffier divide soups?
Into clear and thick
Into clear and thick: consommés made up the clear class and purées, veloutés and creams the thick one, and a menu offering two soups had to serve one of each.
Q 04Which American company introduced condensed canned soup?
Campbell's
Campbell's took most of the water out of its soup, so a smaller can was far cheaper to ship and could sell for a dime instead of more than 30 cents.
Q 05Which Chicago gangster ran a free soup kitchen for the unemployed during the Great Depression?
Al Capone
Al Capone sponsored the kitchen in an apparent bid to clean up his public image, and it served breakfast, lunch and dinner to jobless Chicagoans.
Q 06The red and white of the classic condensed-soup can were borrowed from which Ivy League football team's uniforms?
Cornell
Cornell: in 1898 a company executive, Herberton Williams, watched Cornell play Penn and was so taken by the red-and-white uniforms that he persuaded the firm to use them.
Q 07Which artist's 1962 paintings of soup cans became a pop art icon?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol's 32 canvases stayed together because dealer Irving Blum persuaded early buyers to give theirs back, then paid Warhol $1,000 for the set in monthly instalments.
Q 08Which Thanksgiving side was invented in a soup company's test kitchen?
Green bean casserole
Green bean casserole began when the Associated Press asked the test kitchen for an easy vegetable side made from things most households already kept in the pantry.
Q 09Where can the origins of ramen be traced to?
Yokohama Chinatown
Yokohama Chinatown's noodle soups inspired Rairaiken, which opened in Tokyo's Asakusa in 1910 with Chinese cooks hired from the Chinatown and adapted the dish for Japanese diners.
Q 10What gives ramen noodles their yellow colour and springy bite?
Alkaline water, kansui
Alkaline water, kansui, turns the flour's natural flavonoid pigments yellow at high pH and gives the noodles their mix of stretch and firmness.
Q 11Who invented instant noodles in 1958?
Momofuku Ando
Momofuku Ando tinkered for about a year in his backyard shed before flash-frying cooked noodles into dried blocks that came back to life in hot water within minutes.
Q 12Which Japanese city is the birthplace of miso ramen?
Sapporo
Sapporo's miso ramen is credited to the restaurant Aji no Sanpei, and its rich, lard-slicked pork broth, often topped with butter and sweetcorn, suits Hokkaido's snowy winters.
Q 13Which country is pho from?
Vietnam
Pho is from Vietnam, where it took shape near Hanoi in the early 1900s once French colonial demand put beef, long kept mainly for farm work, on the menu.
Q 21Which ingredient thickens a traditional gazpacho?
Stale bread
Stale bread goes into the mortar early: garlic is pounded first, then soaked bread, oil and salt make a paste, and only then are the ripe vegetables worked in.
Q 22Which French port is bouillabaisse from?
Marseille
Marseille is the home of bouillabaisse, which began as a fishermen's dish made from the bony rockfish they could not sell; a 1980 charter by the city's restaurateurs codified the recipe.
Q 23What does the name 'bouillabaisse' literally describe?
Boiling then lowering the heat
Boiling then lowering the heat: the name is usually traced to Provençal words for 'boil' and 'lower', because once the broth boils the heat is turned down so the fish can cook.
Q 14Which kind of noodle goes into pho?
Flat rice noodles
Flat rice noodles, bánh phở, fill the bowl, and the same fresh sheets, left uncut, are rolled around stir-fried meat and herbs to make phở cuốn.
Q 15How does southern-style pho differ from the northern version?
A sweeter, cloudier broth
A sweeter, cloudier broth marks southern pho, a style that grew after the 1954 partition sent northern migrants south, where cooks added bean sprouts, hoisin sauce and heaps of fresh herbs.
Q 16Which vegetable gives borscht its colour?
Beetroot
Beetroot turns borscht red, but the name also covers other sour soups, such as green borscht made from sorrel and other leafy greens.
Q 17Which country's borscht tradition did UNESCO list as intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding?
Ukraine
Ukraine's borscht-cooking culture was inscribed on 1 July 2022, months into the Russian invasion, on UNESCO's urgent-safeguarding list, with the war's threat to the tradition cited.
Q 18Which wild plant was fermented to make the original borscht?
Common hogweed stems
Common hogweed stems, leaves and flower heads were chopped, covered with water and left to ferment, and the word borshch is traced to the old Slavic name for the plant.
Q 19At what temperature is Andalusian gazpacho traditionally served?
Chilled
Chilled: Andalusians lean on it through long, hot summers, and it is often poured into a tall glass and drunk rather than eaten from a bowl.
Q 20Before tomatoes were added in the 19th century, what colour was gazpacho?
Pale white
Pale white: early gazpacho was a pounded mix of garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt and water, sometimes with almonds, and it only turned red once tomatoes went in.
Q 24What is rouille, served with bouillabaisse?
Garlic and saffron mayonnaise
Garlic and saffron mayonnaise goes with the broth, which is traditionally served first, with the fish brought afterwards as a separate course.
Q 25What is the main difference between New England and Manhattan clam chowder?
Cream against tomato
Cream against tomato is the split, and in 1939 a Maine legislator who had jokingly drafted a bill banning tomatoes from chowder saw the tomato-free version win a cook-off.
Q 26Which French novelist's cookery dictionary tells of an exiled Polish king who stopped at an inn for onion soup?
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas wrote that King Stanislas, Louis XV's father-in-law, liked the soup so much that he refused to travel on until he had learned how to make it.
Q 27Which stock is normally used in French onion soup?
Beef
Beef stock is the usual choice, but some well-known cooks break ranks and make the soup with chicken stock or simply water.
Q 28Which sitcom's gruff 'Soup Nazi' refused to serve customers who broke his strict ordering rules?
Seinfeld
Seinfeld modelled the character on Manhattan soup vendor Al Yeganeh, who was offended by the portrayal even though the episode made his little shop famous.
Q 29What are the two basic components of miso soup?
Fermented paste and dashi stock
Fermented paste and dashi stock are the base, and the paste goes in only once the pot is off the heat, since hard cooking dulls its flavour and aroma.
Q 30Which of these is a common base for the stock in miso soup?
Dried kelp
Dried kelp, kombu, is heated only until the water nears a simmer, because letting it bubble hard can make the stock bitter.