French Food Trivia
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97 free French Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
French cooking has rules, legends and lawsuits, and this quiz covers all three. The 97 questions run from the bakery (why the croissant is really Austrian, what a baguette may legally contain) through the great regional dishes (bouillabaisse in Marseille, cassoulet in Castelnaudary, coq au vin in Burgundy, ratatouille in Nice) to cheese, wine and spirits: Roquefort's caves, Camembert's wooden box, Comté's fruitières, the grapes of Champagne, the 1855 Bordeaux classification and how long Cognac must sit in oak. You will also meet the people who shaped the table: Carême and Escoffier, Brillat-Savarin, Julia Child, Paul Bocuse and the Michelin brothers who gave away a guide to sell tyres. Some questions any Francophile will get; others, like which mayor of Nice banned boiled potatoes from his salad or which year beef bourguignon was first written down, are there to settle arguments. It suits a dinner party, a Bastille Day quiz, a French class or a food-and-drink round at the pub. Every answer has been checked against a source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you answer.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French custom did UNESCO add to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010?
Gastronomic meal
The gastronomic meal of the French was listed as a ritual, not a recipe: an apéritif, at least four courses from starter to dessert, then liqueurs, with wines chosen to match the dishes.
Q 02What military-style name is given to the system of kitchen stations that Auguste Escoffier devised?
The brigade
The brigade de cuisine drew on Escoffier's years as an army cook: he replaced the loud, riotous kitchens of his day with a chain of command and a specialist station for every task.
Q 03Escoffier created the dessert Peach Melba in honour of an Australian who was what?
An opera singer
An opera singer: soprano Nellie Melba had been singing in Wagner's Lohengrin in London, so Escoffier first served her the peaches and ice cream on a swan carved from ice, after the opera's swan.
Q 04The croissant descends from the kipferl, a crescent-shaped pastry from which country?
Austria
Austria's kipferl reached Paris when August Zang, a former artillery officer from Vienna, opened his Boulangerie Viennoise in the late 1830s; the French only later remade it in flaky laminated dough.
Q 05Which four ingredients may a French 'baguette de tradition' contain?
Flour, water, yeast, salt
Flour, water, yeast or sourdough, and salt make the dough, with no additives, under the 1993 bread decree; it answered the arrival of frozen, pre-made doughs, and it bars pre-made dough from any loaf sold as traditional.
Q 06What does the French word baguette literally mean?
Wand or stick
Wand or stick: the French also say baguette for a magic wand, a conductor's baton and chopsticks, and the loaf only took the name in the twentieth century.
Q 07Bouillabaisse, the famous fish stew, originated in which French port city?
Marseille
Bouillabaisse comes from Marseille, where fishermen stewed the bony rockfish, such as rascasse, that they could not sell; local restaurateurs codified the recipe in a 1980 charter.
Q 08What is rouille, the sauce served with bouillabaisse?
A garlic and saffron mayonnaise
Rouille is a garlic and saffron mayonnaise, thickened with olive oil and often bread or egg yolk and sharpened with cayenne; its name means 'rust', for its orange colour.
Q 09Cassoulet takes its name from the cassole, which is what?
An earthenware cooking pot
An earthenware cooking pot: the deep, slope-sided cassole was traditionally made by the potters of Issel, and the beans and meats bake slowly in it until a crust forms on top.
Q 10Which town in southern France styles itself the world capital of cassoulet and claims to be its birthplace?
Castelnaudary
Castelnaudary's legend says cassoulet was born in a Hundred Years' War siege, when the townsfolk pooled their beans and meats in one pot to feed the defenders; its cassoulet brotherhood dates from 1970.
Q 11Coq au vin is traditionally made with red wine from which region?
Burgundy
The classic coq au vin is braised in red Burgundy with lardons, mushrooms and pearl onions; Alsace makes a white version with Riesling and the Jura uses its vin jaune.
Q 12Ratatouille is a traditional dish of which French region?
Provence
Provence claims the dish, though the word once meant any rough, thrown-together stew; only later did it settle on summer vegetables softened in olive oil.
Q 13Helix pomatia, the large snail served as escargots in France, is named in English after which ancient people?
Romans
Romans did eat snails, fattening them in pens, and English calls this one the Roman snail; the species is hard to farm, so most are gathered from the wild.
Q 21Which cheese received France's very first Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, in 1925?
Roquefort
Roquefort won France's first cheese appellation in 1925, but its protection is centuries older: a royal charter of 1411 gave the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon the sole right to ripen the cheese in its caves.
Q 22Camembert comes from which French region?
Normandy
Camembert is from the village of Camembert in Normandy's Orne department, where legend says farmer Marie Harel first made it in 1791; the round poplar box that let it travel was introduced in 1890.
Q 23Which French PDO cheese has the largest annual production, about 65,000 tonnes?
Comté
Comté, from the Jura massif, is France's biggest-volume PDO cheese, with output passing 60,000 tonnes a year; it is made in village cooperative dairies called fruitières from the Montbéliarde breed of cow and aged in large wheels.
Q 14A macaron shell is made from egg whites, sugar and which ground ingredient?
Almonds
Almonds ground with sugar and bound with egg whites made macarons long before Paris sandwiched them: in Nancy two nuns who took refuge there in the Revolution sold them to live and became the 'Macaron Sisters'.
Q 15Which Paris pâtisserie is often credited with inventing the double-decker macaron?
Ladurée
Pierre Desfontaines of Ladurée usually gets the credit, though a baker named Claude Gerbet also claimed the invention.
Q 16Add a fried or poached egg on top of a croque monsieur and it becomes a croque what?
Madame
Madame is the name once a fried or poached egg sits on top; in some parts of France the same sandwich is a croque-à-cheval, the French way of saying the egg rides 'on horseback'.
Q 17Which ingredient do purists leave out of a traditional quiche Lorraine?
Grated Gruyère
Grated Gruyère has no place in the Lorraine original, which is only eggs, cream and smoked bacon in a crust; grated cheese is the habit of the neighbouring Vosges, and fried onions are Alsace's twist.
Q 18Tarte Tatin, the upside-down caramelised apple tart, is named after two sisters who ran what?
A hotel
A hotel: the Hôtel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron. In the best-known tale an overworked Stéphanie Tatin left her apples caramelising too long and rescued them by baking the pastry on top.
Q 19What does the 'brûlée' in crème brûlée mean?
Burnt
Burnt: the earliest known recipe, printed by François Massialot in 1691, has the cook scorch the sugared top with a red-hot fire shovel, and the 1702 English edition simply called it burnt cream.
Q 20The blue cheese aged in the Combalou caves of southern France is made from the milk of which animal?
Sheep
Sheep's milk, from the Lacaune breed alone, goes into the cheese; legend says a shepherd left his bread and curds in a cave to chase a girl and came back to find them veined with blue mould.
Q 24Which three grapes make up nearly all Champagne?
Pinot noir, Pinot meunier, Chardonnay
Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay make nearly all Champagne, and two of the three are black grapes: they are pressed so gently that the juice runs clear before the skins can colour it.
Q 25What is the muselet on a bottle of Champagne?
The wire cage over the cork
The wire cage over the cork replaced knotted hemp string: Champagne merchant Adolphe Jacquesson patented a metal fastening in 1844 because tied corks kept leaking or blowing out under the pressure.
Q 26The Michelin Guide was first published in 1900 by a company that made what?
Tyres
André and Édouard Michelin, whose Clermont-Ferrand company made tyres, gave away nearly 35,000 copies of the 1900 guide to encourage motoring; restaurant stars only arrived in 1926.
Q 27In the Michelin Guide, three stars officially mean a restaurant is what?
Worth a special journey
Worth a special journey is travel advice because the guide was written to get motorists on the road: two stars mean 'worth a detour', and the three-step scale arrived in 1931, five years after the first star.
Q 28Which American wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the Frenchwomen Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle?
Julia Child
Julia Child joined the two Frenchwomen's project in Paris; their first publisher dropped the manuscript as 'too formidable' for American housewives before Knopf brought it out in 1961.
Q 29Which of these is one of the five French mother sauces?
Velouté
Velouté, stock thickened with a blond roux, was already one of Carême's four 'great sauces' in 1833; the five taught today keep it and swap his allemande for tomato and hollandaise.
Q 30Which French city names the mustard first sharpened with verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes?
Dijon
Dijon mustard used verjuice where others used vinegar, an edge now imitated with white wine; a 1937 decree made the name generic, so a jar of 'Dijon' can be made anywhere, mostly from Canadian seed.