Cassava

Most North Americans know cassava only in the form of tapioca pudding, but it is an American domesticate that is a staple for an estimated 500 million people in ninety-two countries, mostly in tropical Africa and Asia as well as South America. Cassava (also known as manioc or yucca) is the tuber of a large shrub, Manihot esculenta. The word “cassava” comes from the Taino Indian word for cassava bread, a stiff flatbread offered to Columbus by the Taino Indians on Hispaniola. Cassava bread is still produced in the Dominican Republic and is widely available in urban bodegas in New York City and other East Coast American cities. The original domestication was probably in Brazil, where cassava meal, “farinha,” is still part of every meal. Cassava was a staple of the Mayan empire and had reached Peru and Argentina before the arrival of Columbus. The Taino preferred it to maize, and their other name, “Arawaks,” means “eaters of meal.” Cassava is an unusual domesticate, in that the raw roots of most varieties contain fatal amounts of prussic acid. Thus the Indians had to devise methods of grating, soaking, pressing, boiling, drying, and roasting to produce edible starches and syrups. (Some inferior varieties can be peeled and boiled like potatoes.) Cassava became a slave staple in Brazil and was disseminated by the Portuguese to central Africa, by the Dutch to Indonesia, and by the Spanish to the Philippines. Cassava was probably grown in parts of Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia to feed slaves, but the written record is unclear. The earliest reference in English is Thomas Harriot’s account of 1585–1586; he described the food of the Indians of the outer banks of the Carolinas: “Coscúshaw, some of our company took to be that kind of root which the Spaniards in the West Indies call Cassauy, whereupon also many called it by that name.” If this was true cassava, it might have been brought there by far-ranging Tainos or, more likely, by the Spanish Carolina colonists of 1526, whose one hundred African slaves rebelled and joined the Indians near the Pee Dee River.