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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Bermuda
BermudaNorth America · This week's dish comes from Hamilton
About Bermuda
Bermuda's cuisine is Atlantic and British-Caribbean, fish chowder laced with rum and sherry pepper, the traditional Sunday codfish breakfast, and moist banana bread. Seafood and island baking define the table.
Bermudian fish chowder takes no flour and no cream, and cooks are emphatic about it: the body comes from long reduction and from the gelatin in fish heads and bones. It is finished at the table with two things, black rum and sherry peppers, the latter descended from a sailors' habit of fortifying sherry with bird's-eye chillies.
Christmas here means cassava pie, a savoury-sweet dish of grated cassava with pork and chicken baked slowly, and the tradition is documented back to 1612. That is early enough that the island's cooking preserves a seventeenth-century Atlantic layer, cassava from the Caribbean and salt cod from the north, that later arrivals never replaced.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Bermuda Banana Bread
A dense, moist banana loaf, lightly spiced and buttery, that Bermudians bake for breakfast and afternoon tea alike.
Serves 8 · Prep 15 min · Cook 60 min · Difficulty: easy
See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →
Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.
Discussion prompts
1. Find Bermuda on a world map or globe. It sits in North America. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Bermuda Banana Bread comes from Hamilton, in Bermuda. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?
3. Read the short story behind Bermuda Banana Bread. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Bermuda shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Bermuda Banana Bread to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Bermuda about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Bermuda Banana Bread, add Bermuda to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.
🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers