Cassava

On Hispaniola, the Taíno grated cassava roots and packed the pulp into a cibucán, a long woven tube of palm leaves. Twisting the tube hard squeezed out a juice that, the Spanish writer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo warned, would kill anyone who drank it. The dry pulp left behind was baked on a hot clay griddle into a flat bread, cazabi, which kept for a year or more.

Cassava (also called manioc or yuca) is the starchy root of a shrub. People first grew it in southwestern Amazonia, in what are now northwestern Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and eastern Acre in Brazil, and the lowlands of Bolivia nearby. Remains thought to be of farmed cassava are about 8,000 years old on the Pacific coast of Peru and about 6,500 years old in Mexico. Some kinds, called sweet, are safe to eat after simple cooking. Others, called bitter, hold a poison that turns into cyanide; it must be removed by grating, squeezing, soaking or heating. Bitter kinds were most common in the central and eastern Amazon and the Guianas. Farmers could plant cassava from cuttings of the stem, and it grows where rain is low or uneven.

After 1492, Spaniards on the islands took up cassava bread as their own food. Portuguese ships brought cassava to the west coast of Africa in the 1500s, and later took it to their stations around the mouth of the Congo. Africans then carried it inland over the next two to three centuries. In East Africa it was grown much more widely after 1850. Today it is a main food in much of tropical Africa.

Three library texts show cassava in the Americas. Oviedo's Maize and Cassava Bread describes Taíno planting and baking on Hispaniola. Jean de Léry, in Making Manioc Flour in a Tupinambá Village, watched Tupinambá women in Brazil grate and toast manioc into flour, and he separates the root that can be roasted whole from the one that is poison unless made into well-cooked flour. Cristóbal de Acuña, in Food from the Great River, 1639, tells how Amazon peoples buried manioc in pits to save it from the yearly floods, and made drink from it.