← For Teachers
🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Dominica
DominicaNorth America · This week's dish comes from Roseau
About Dominica
Dominica, the 'Nature Isle,' cooks close to the land: crab callaloo, made the official national dish in 2013, and one-pot stews rich with root vegetables and coconut. Fresh, green, and Creole, its table reflects a lush volcanic island.
Crab callaloo is specific: dasheen or tannia leaves cooked down in coconut milk with land or river crab, seasoned with thyme and hot pepper, and it was formally adopted as the national dish in September 2013, replacing an older unofficial one. The leaves must be cooked through, because raw dasheen leaf is sharp with calcium oxalate.
Dominica is the only Eastern Caribbean island with a surviving pre-Columbian Indigenous population, the Kalinago, whose territory on the Atlantic coast was set aside in 1903 and formally renamed in 2015. Cassava processing is still demonstrated there, and the island's rivers, rainfall and volcanic soil are what make ground provisions rather than sugar the basis of the cooking.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Fried Bakes with Zaboca
Golden fried bakes split and filled with seasoned mashed avocado (zaboca), a simple, satisfying vegan breakfast from the Nature Isle.
Serves 4 · Prep 20 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 Dominica 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. Fried Bakes with Zaboca comes from Roseau, in Dominica. 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 Fried Bakes with Zaboca. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Dominica shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Fried Bakes with Zaboca to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Dominica about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Fried Bakes with Zaboca, add Dominica 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