Cassava, Manihot esculenta, also called manioc or yuca, is a starchy root crop domesticated in Brazil, though estimates for exactly when and where within Brazil vary by study. It was a staple of Amerindian communities such as the Tupinamba, encountered growing cassava by Portuguese arrivals in Bahia around 1500 and processed by them into meal and bread. The same Portuguese traders carried cassava to their West African coastal stations by the mid sixteenth century, provisioning slave ships bound for the Americas with it as farinha, and from those West African footholds cassava spread across the continent to become, after maize, one of Sub-Saharan Africa's most important staple foods, valued for tolerating poor soil and drought where other staples fail.
Facts
Disputed
Earliest Documented Use, From (Year)The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture hedges cassava domestication at maybe five thousand years ago; separate, more recent genomic studies of Brazilian germplasm propose a substantially older date, over ten thousand years, that this atlas does not adopt outright because that work remains a preprint rather than a peer reviewed publication. A wide range is given rather than a single year. Origin RegionBrazil (a reference encyclopedia places domestication along Brazil's southern border; separate genetic studies instead point to west-central Brazil or the wider Amazon basin, so the exact locale within Brazil is not settled) 1 The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture places domestication somewhere in Central or South America, perhaps along the southern border of Brazil, itself a hedge; more recent comparative genomic studies of Brazilian germplasm instead centre wild populations in west-central Brazil. This atlas gives the published reference-work claim as its citable figure rather than an unreviewed preprint. Connections
Used By
Cassava is an Indigenous Taino staple carried into Caribbean cooking.
Source Caribbean Cuisine (Wikipedia)
Source Larousse Gastronomique
Source Larousse Gastronomique
Source The Oxford Companion to FoodAlan Davidson
Sources
1. Cassava (Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, via Encyclopedia.com)
Encyclopedia.comLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Cassava, or manioc (Manihot esculenta), is a root crop native to tropical America that is now consumed by millions of people throughout the tropics, and is used in food preparation in many industrialized processes.
The Oxford Companion to Food
Alan Davidson, Oxford University Press, 2014Used By: West African Cuisine
Caribbean Cuisine (Wikipedia)
Larousse Gastronomique
Hamlyn, 2009- Used By: Nigerian Cuisine, entry: Cassava
- Used By: Ghanaian Cuisine, entry: Cassava
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