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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidad & TobagoNorth America · This week's dish comes from Port of Spain
About Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago cooks some of the Caribbean's most diverse street food, where Indian, African, and Creole roots meet in doubles, roti, and curry. Scotch bonnet heat, green seasoning, and callaloo define its lively, spice-forward plates.
Doubles began in Princes Town, not Port of Spain, and are two soft fried bara breads folded around curried channa with tamarind, cucumber and pepper sauce added to order. The Indian layer in Trinidad arrived with indentured labourers after 1845, the same history that produced Indo-Fijian cooking on the other side of the world.
Green seasoning is the base almost everything starts from: a blitzed wet paste of chadon beni, thyme, scallion, garlic and pepper that gets rubbed into meat hours ahead and stirred into pots. Callaloo here is made from dasheen leaves cooked down with okra and coconut milk, which is a different dish from what the same word means elsewhere in the region.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Kurma
Crunchy fried sticks of ginger-spiced dough tumbled in a hard sugar glaze, a Trinidadian Indo-Caribbean sweet.
Serves 8 · Prep 25 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 Trinidad & Tobago 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. Kurma comes from Port of Spain, in Trinidad & Tobago. 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 Kurma. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Trinidad & Tobago shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Kurma to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Trinidad & Tobago about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Kurma, add Trinidad & Tobago 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