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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Haiti
HaitiNorth America · This week's dish comes from Ouest (Port-au-Prince)
About Haiti
Haitian cooking is bold and proud, griot (twice-cooked pork), rice and beans, and the fiery pikliz slaw, all lifted by the herb base epis. African, French, and Taíno roots meet in a deeply flavorful Creole table.
Soup joumou is drunk on 1 January and means what it is drunk for. The squash soup was associated with French colonists and became, after independence in 1804, the dish that marks the anniversary of freedom, eaten by everyone that morning. UNESCO inscribed it in 2021, Haiti's first inscription.
Griot earns the twice-cooked description: pork marinated in sour orange and epis, the green herb base of garlic, peppers, parsley and thyme that starts most Haitian pots, then simmered until tender and fried until the edges go crisp. Pikliz beside it is cabbage, carrot and scotch bonnet left in vinegar, and it is there to cut the fat.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Espageti Ayisyen
Haiti's famous breakfast spaghetti tossed with smoky herring, onions, peppers, and a hit of epis and ketchup, savory morning comfort.
Serves 4 · Prep 10 min · Cook 20 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 Haiti 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. Espageti Ayisyen comes from Ouest (Port-au-Prince), in Haiti. 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 Espageti Ayisyen. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Haiti shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Espageti Ayisyen to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Haiti about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Espageti Ayisyen, add Haiti 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