Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
49 free Soul Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The expression 'soul food' came into use in which decade?
The 1960s
The 1960s: 'soul' became the watchword of Black American culture in that decade, and 'soul food' spread alongside soul music and the Black Power movement.
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 04Which month is celebrated as National Soul Food Month?
June
June is National Soul Food Month, a designation introduced by the Culinary Historians of Chicago; it shares the month with Juneteenth, whose barbecues and red foods belong to the same tradition.
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 of these crops was NOT an African food carried on slave ships to the American South?
Maize
Maize is a Native American crop; okra, black-eyed peas, millet, rice and yams all crossed the Atlantic from Africa.
Q 07By tradition, enslaved African women smuggled rice, okra and millet seeds to the Americas by hiding them where?
In their braided hair
In their braided hair, oral tradition holds: the women hid rice, okra and millet seeds in cornrows as a hedge against an unknown future in the land where they would be forced to work.
Q 08Which African bird, brought to the Americas via the slave trade, fed enslaved people on plantations?
Guinea fowl
Guinea fowl, an African bird domesticated long before the Atlantic trade, reached the Caribbean and the American South with the slave trade; enslaved people raised the hardy birds for eggs and meat.
Q 09A typical weekly ration for an enslaved person was a peck of corn meal and roughly how much pork?
3-4 pounds
3-4 pounds of salt pork a week was the common allowance alongside the peck of meal; owners kept the hams and left the offal, which is why many soul food classics come from parts nobody else wanted.
Q 10What did enslaved people call the plantation-house leftovers put in troughs on Sundays?
Juba
The word appears in many African languages, where folk knowledge records it meaning 'little bits' of food.
Q 11What did the abundance of bowls over plates in slave-cabin digs suggest about meals?
They were mostly stews and one-pot dishes
They were mostly stews and one-pot dishes: bowls suit soupy food, while the plates and flatware of planter households point to individual cuts of meat and vegetables served separately.
Q 12Douglass wrote that enslaved people fished turtles and eels from which Maryland river?
The Choptank
Douglass recorded a monthly allowance of eight pounds of pork or its equivalent in fish, plus a bushel of cornmeal.
Q 13Which prized enslaved cook at Mount Vernon had quasi-freedom to leave the house and sell leftovers for money?
Q 21Collard greens are the same species as which common vegetables?
Cabbage and broccoli
Cabbage and broccoli, like collards, are cultivars of a single species, Brassica oleracea; collards sit in the loose-leafed kale group and have been eaten since classical antiquity.
Q 22Hominy is corn treated with an alkali in a process called what?
Nixtamalization
Nixtamalization, a Native American technique, soaks corn in limewater or wood-ash lye, loosening the hull and freeing the niacin; Lowcountry cooks long called cooked grits 'hominy'.
Q 23A hushpuppy is a deep-fried ball made from what kind of batter?
Cornmeal
Hercules Posey
Hercules Posey, George Washington's enslaved chef, was let out to sell kitchen leftovers for his own money and dressed like a gentleman on the proceeds; he escaped in February 1797.
Q 14Chitterlings, or chitlins, are which part of the pig?
The intestines
The intestines of the pig, cleaned and simmered for hours, are chitterlings; the organ meat went to enslaved cooks while planters kept the hams, and similar dishes appear across Asia and Africa.
Q 15What 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 16Which pie is the traditional soul food holiday dessert, in place of pumpkin pie?
Sweet potato pie
Sweet potato pie fills the pumpkin-pie slot on soul food holiday tables; its filling is a custard of mashed sweet potato, evaporated milk, eggs and warm spices, baked in an open shell.
Q 17Hoppin' John is a dish of rice cooked with which legume?
Black-eyed peas
Black-eyed peas simmered with rice and a piece of pork make Hoppin' John; Lowcountry cooks often use smaller field peas or Sea Island red peas in their place.
Q 18Eating Hoppin' John with collard greens on which day is believed to bring twelve months of prosperity?
New Year's Day
New Year's Day is the traditional date: the peas stand for coins and the greens for folding money, and some cooks drop a real coin in the pot for extra luck.
Q 19The black-eyed pea is a subspecies of which Old World plant domesticated in Africa?
The cowpea
The cowpea, Vigna unguiculata, is the African-domesticated species; the black-eyed pea is one of its subspecies, sold commercially as the California Blackeye and in heirloom forms such as the purple hull pea.
Q 20Okra, a staple of gumbo and soul food, crossed the Atlantic from which region?
West Africa
West Africa: okra came to the Americas with the Atlantic slave trade, and the Bantu word for it, ki-ngombo, gave Louisiana its 'gumbo'; the plant is a mallow, kin to cotton and hibiscus.
Cornmeal batter, usually with chopped onion, is dropped by the spoonful into hot oil to make hushpuppies, the classic side for fried fish.
Q 24Chicken and waffles, a soul food staple, originated as a meal of which American culinary tradition?
Pennsylvania Dutch
Pennsylvania Dutch cooks paired waffles with stewed chicken and gravy long before the fried-chicken version; Harlem's Wells Supper Club popularized the soul food pairing in the 1930s.
Q 25Cracklins, stirred into crackling bread, are fried pieces of what?
Pork skin
Pork skin with its fat attached, fried until it puffs and crisps, makes cracklins; cooks stir the crunchy bits into corn batter for crackling bread.
Q 26Which mid-20th-century seasoned salt is a staple in Black American kitchens?
Lawry's
Lawry's Seasoned Salt, created in 1938 for the Lawry's Prime Rib restaurant, puts several herbs and spices in one cheap shaker, so it goes on almost everything except desserts.
Q 27In what year was Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking published?
1881
1881 is the date of Abby Fisher's book, printed in San Francisco; it was long called the first cookbook by a Black American until Malinda Russell's 1866 volume resurfaced.
Q 28Rufus 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 employed Estes as a cook on its luxury dining cars; born into slavery in Tennessee, he later self-published Good Things to Eat in 1911.
Q 29Sylvia Woods, the 'queen of soul food', opened her Harlem restaurant in which year?
1962
1962 is when Sylvia and Herbert Woods bought the Harlem luncheonette where she had waited tables since 1954, renaming it Sylvia's; it grew into a brand of sauces and cookbooks.
Q 30Sylvia Woods was born in Hemingway, in which state?
South Carolina
South Carolina: Woods was born in 1926 in Hemingway, a farm town in Williamsburg County, and moved to Harlem as a teenager, working in a Brooklyn factory before a luncheonette kitchen.