Southern Food
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48 free Southern Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Southern cooking is what happened when Native American corn, European livestock and flour, and West African okra, rice and black-eyed peas met in the same kitchen, usually with an enslaved cook at the stove. The result ranges from Lowcountry rice and Appalachian ramps to Nashville hot chicken, Memphis dry rub, Kentucky's Hot Brown and Florida's Key lime pie, and it is the one region where McDonald's breakfast menu maps the biscuit belt. These 48 questions cover the roots, from the Three Sisters and nixtamalized hominy to the Scottish and West African ancestors of fried chicken; the staples, from grits, cornbread and hushpuppies to country ham, red-eye gravy and Hoppin' John; the four recognised barbecue sauces and which state has them all; the sweets, from chess pie and peach cobbler to the Georgia grits law and Florida's official pie; and the regions, from Smithfield ham and Brunswick stew to pepperoni rolls, Country Captain, pimento cheese at the Masters and the mint julep at Churchill Downs. Every answer is cited to the page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Grits are a porridge made from which grain?
Corn
Corn. Native peoples of the Southeast were pounding and boiling it long before Europeans arrived, and English settlers had adopted the dish by 1630.
Q 02Which Native American crop trio was known as the Three Sisters?
Beans, maize and squash
Beans, maize and squash. Planted in the same mound, the maize stalks give the beans a pole to climb, the beans add nitrogen to the soil and the squash leaves shade out weeds.
Q 03Which of these vegetables did enslaved West Africans introduce to the South?
Okra
Okra. Its name comes from a West African language, and 'gumbo', the Louisiana stew it thickens, probably comes from a Bantu word for the same pod.
Q 04Which Lowcountry people made rice prominent because they already knew the crop?
The Gullah
The Gullah. Carolina planters paid more for captives from West Africa's Rice Coast, whose skill with dikes and flooded fields made the plantations work; their descendants still live on the Sea Islands.
Q 05Fried chicken in the South traces partly to frying traditions from which European country?
Scotland
Scotland. Scots are thought to have fried their chicken in fat where the English baked or boiled it, though food historians admit the dish's early history is something of a mystery.
Q 06Which New Orleans dessert, cooked in butter, brown sugar and rum, is set alight and served over ice cream?
Bananas Foster
Bananas Foster. Brennan's restaurant created it in 1951, when the city was a major hub for banana imports, and named it for Richard Foster, a friend of the owner.
Q 07Red-eye gravy is made by stirring which drink into the pan drippings of fried country ham?
Black coffee
Black coffee. It loosens the salty ham drippings into a thin, dark sauce, and diners dip a split biscuit in it so the ham sandwich is not too dry.
Q 08What did Confederate soldiers eat instead of wheat hardtack?
Cornbread
Cornbread. Wheat was scarce in most Confederate states, so soldiers baked cornmeal, salt and water into rock-hard 'dodgers' and Johnny cakes instead.
Q 09Which chef wrote The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), a landmark cookbook and memoir of Southern farm life?
Edna Lewis
Edna Lewis. She grew up in Freetown, a farming settlement of freed slaves and their descendants, and she built the book around the seasons of that community.
Q 10Which hot sauce has been made on Louisiana's Avery Island since 1868?
Tabasco
Tabasco. Edmund McIlhenny first made it there from peppers, vinegar and salt, and his family's company still bottles it on the same island.
Q 11Which Atlanta restaurant did Martin Luther King Jr use to 'eat, meet, rest, plan, and strategize'?
Paschal's
Paschal's. Two brothers opened it as a small sandwich shop in 1947, and King won their permission to bring his team and guests there whenever he was back in the city.
Q 12Alabama's 'white barbecue sauce' is based on what?
Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise. Pitmaster Bob Gibson is credited with inventing it in Decatur in 1925, and it stayed a north Alabama secret until it was first bottled for sale in 1994.
Q 13The golden-yellow barbecue sauce of central South Carolina has which base?
Mustard
Mustard. Known as Carolina Gold, it is linked to a 'Mustard Belt' of counties where German immigrants settled in the 1700s, and it may have begun in their kitchens.
Q 21Which sandwich did Garden & Gun call 'the South's most beloved'?
Tomato
Tomato. Ripe summer slices go on soft white bread, and the best one, the magazine says, is eaten leaning over the kitchen sink with the juice running down your chin.
Q 22Boiled peanuts are linked to which 1866 song about Civil War rations?
Goober Peas
Goober Peas. 'Goober' was a Southern word for the peanut, and the song jokes about Confederate soldiers cut off from their supplies with little else left to eat.
Q 23Country Captain is a Southern dish of rice and chicken flavoured how?
With curry
With curry. The dish began in the Anglo-Indian kitchens of British India, and General George Patton loved it so much that the Army put it in its ration packs from 2000 to 2004.
Q 14Cajun and Creole cooks call onions, celery and which third vegetable their 'holy trinity'?
Bell pepper
Bell pepper. The trio is Louisiana's answer to French mirepoix, with green pepper standing in for the carrot, and it starts gumbo, jambalaya and étouffée.
Q 15Eastern North Carolina barbecue uses which kind of sauce?
Vinegar-based
Vinegar-based. Eastern pitmasters cook the whole hog, 'every part except the squeal', and dress it with vinegar and pepper alone; the Lexington style further west stirs in ketchup.
Q 16Memphis barbecue is distinctive for what?
A dry rub with no sauce while cooking
A dry rub with no sauce while cooking. The ribs are coated in salt and spices before they go in the pit and usually eaten as they are; order them 'wet' and they are brushed with sauce instead.
Q 17Which city is known for hot chicken from places like Prince's Hot Chicken Shack?
Nashville
Nashville. As the Prince family tells it, a girlfriend peppered Thornton Prince's fried chicken as revenge for a late night out, and he liked it so much he started selling it.
Q 18What is a 'pig pickin''?
A whole-hog grilling event
A whole-hog grilling event. The pig is split and laid flat over the coals for hours, and families hold one for weddings, graduations and holidays, while towns run cook-offs for prize money.
Q 19What do Southern cooks call the savoury broth left after boiling greens?
Potlikker
Potlikker. It is sipped warm like a soup, and in 1935 Huey Long gave the Senate his recipe for it during a filibuster that lasted more than 15 hours.
Q 20Hoppin' John combines rice with which legume?
Black-eyed peas
Black-eyed peas. Eaten with collard greens on New Year's Day, the dish is said to bring a year of luck and prosperity; along the Lowcountry coast, cooks use smaller field peas.
Q 24A cook in Columbus made Country Captain famous by serving it to which president?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Patton became another famous devotee.
Q 25Chess pie is traditionally made with eggs, butter and what?
Sugar or molasses
Sugar or molasses. With so little else in the custard, many cooks add a spoonful of vinegar or buttermilk to cut the sweetness and a little cornmeal to thicken it.
Q 26Which shellfish, harvested mostly in Louisiana, is the classic filling of an étouffée?
Crawfish
Crawfish. The tails are 'smothered', which is what étouffée means, in a buttery sauce and spooned over rice; Louisiana supplies most of the nation's catch.
Q 27Which wild onion is an Appalachian spring staple with its own festivals?
Ramps
Ramps. Foraged in early spring, they taste of both garlic and onion, and mountain towns mark the harvest with ramp suppers such as Richwood's Feast of the Ramson.
Q 28As of the 2020s, which state grows the most rice in the United States?
Arkansas
Arkansas. Its prairie and Delta farms grow close to half of all American rice, far more than the Carolina coast where the crop first made Southern fortunes.
Q 29Which state is home to Key lime pie and 'swamp cabbage'?
Florida
Its Caribbean-influenced fusion cooking is called Floribbean.
Q 30Which state is known for Burgoo, beer cheese and the Hot Brown?
Kentucky
Kentucky. Burgoo is a stew made by the kettleful from whatever meat was at hand, once squirrel, rabbit and venison, and beer cheese is a sharp Cheddar spread.