NOV20

Classroom lesson · Food · 🇩🇲 Dominica

Callaloo Soup

A thick, nourishing green soup made from the dasheen plant

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Callaloo soup is one of the most loved everyday foods in Dominica. It is a thick, creamy green soup made from the large leaves of the dasheen plant — a big leafy vegetable that grows all over the Caribbean. It is often cooked with coconut milk, okra, pumpkin, and spices to make a soup that is filling, nutritious, and delicious.

Tell me more

Dasheen (also called taro) is grown across Dominica in kitchen gardens and on hillside farms. The leaves are big, heart-shaped, and deep green. When you cook them down slowly in water, they turn the whole pot a beautiful bright green. Add coconut milk and the soup becomes creamy and rich, with a slightly earthy, nutty taste.

Callaloo soup is often eaten for breakfast or lunch, especially on Saturdays when families cook together. Different cooks add different things — some add saltfish, some add crab, some add dumplings called 'provision'. Grandmothers on the island are famous for their own special recipes, passed down for generations.

The dasheen plant is also an important crop for Dominica. The root (called the corm) can be boiled and eaten as a starchy vegetable, a bit like a potato. Together with other local crops like breadfruit, plantain, and sweet potato, dasheen is part of what Dominicans call 'ground provisions' — the vegetables grown right there in the earth.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Why might eating food grown locally — like dasheen in Dominica — be important for a small island?
  2. 02Callaloo soup recipes are passed down through families. Do you have a recipe in your family that someone taught you?
  3. 03What vegetables do you know that turn their cooking water a bright colour? Why do you think that happens?
Try this

Classroom activity

Design a recipe card for callaloo soup. Write out the ingredients (you can look some up), draw the finished bowl, and add a box called 'My secret ingredient' where you invent something you would personally add to make it special. Decorate the card with illustrations of dasheen leaves.

More about Dominica

Other things that make Dominica special

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