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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Curaçao
CuraçaoNorth America · This week's dish comes from Willemstad
About Curaçao
Curaçao's Dutch-Caribbean cuisine is famous for keshi yena, a shell of Edam cheese stuffed with spiced meat. Iguana stew, funchi cornmeal, and Latin, African, and Dutch roots define the ABC-island table.
The origin account for keshi yena is that enslaved people filled the emptied rinds of Gouda or Edam with meat, raisins, olives and capers, and keshi is simply Papiamento for the Dutch kaas. It belongs to Aruba as much as to Curacao, and modern cooks bake it in ramekins as often as in a cheese shell.
The ABC islands sit in the southern Caribbean dry zone and get around sixty centimetres of rain a year, which is closer to a desert than to the wet tropics further north. That is why so much of the pantry keeps or arrives by ship, hard Dutch cheese and salt cod among it, and why funchi, a stiff cornmeal, does the work of a starch that does not need irrigating.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Arepa di Pampuna
Sweet Curaçaoan pumpkin pancakes, spiced with cinnamon and anise and fried until lacy-edged, a Dutch-Caribbean morning treat.
Serves 4 · Prep 15 min · Cook 15 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 Curaçao 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. Arepa di Pampuna comes from Willemstad, in Curaçao. 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 Arepa di Pampuna. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Curaçao shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Arepa di Pampuna to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Curaçao about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Arepa di Pampuna, add Curaçao 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