← For Teachers
🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Mauritania
MauritaniaAfrica · This week's dish comes from Nouakchott
About Mauritania
Mauritanian cuisine reflects Saharan nomad life, spiced rice with fish or meat (thieboudienne-style), grilled lamb, dates, and camel's milk. Couscous and sweet mint tea anchor a desert table of hospitality.
The rice dish here is thieboudienne-style rather than Mauritanian in origin: ceebu jen came from Saint-Louis in Senegal and is shared along this coast. Zrig, soured camel or goat milk thinned with water and sometimes sweetened, is the drink taken to break a fast and the one most particular to the country.
Tea is a sequence, not a cup. Green tea is brewed three times from the same leaves, poured from a height into small glasses to raise a head of foam, and served in three rounds that are said to go from bitter to sweet. Sitting through all three is the social obligation, and refusing partway is noticed.
The wider picture: Fifty-four countries of tagines, stews, and fire-kissed grills.
This week's dish: Dates Stuffed with Butter
Plump dates split and filled with cardamom-scented butter, a Saharan sweet of Mauritanian hospitality.
Serves 4 · Prep 15 min · Cook 0 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 Mauritania on a world map or globe. It sits in Africa. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Dates Stuffed with Butter comes from Nouakchott, in Mauritania. 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 Dates Stuffed with Butter. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Mauritania shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Dates Stuffed with Butter to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Mauritania about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Dates Stuffed with Butter, add Mauritania 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