The Taíno cassava flatbread of the Antilles, the grated root pressed bone dry and baked on a griddle into a brittle white disc that keeps for months and was the ship's bread of the Caribbean
Origin: Hispaniola and the Greater Antilles
From the journey of Cassava.
Casabe is the oldest bread still eaten in the Americas. The Taíno of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico grew cassava in raised earth mounds called conucos, grated the roots on boards studded with stone chips, pressed them in woven tubes, sieved the dry crumb, and baked it on a clay griddle, the burén, into a large thin disc. It contains cassava and, at most, salt. The bread has no fat and almost no moisture, and that is the point of it. Left dry it keeps for months in a tropical climate without going mouldy or weevilly, which wheat biscuit emphatically does not, and within a generation of contact the Spanish had adopted it wholesale as the standard provision of their Caribbean fleets. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described its making in detail in the 1530s. The Spanish word for it, cazabe, is where English gets the name of the plant. It is eaten softened rather than dry: dipped in soup, moistened with water or oil, spread with garlic, or laid under a stew to collapse into it. In the Dominican Republic it is served beside sancocho as a matter of course, and in Venezuela and Colombia the same bread appears under the same name across the Orinoco country. It has never stopped being made, and in 2024 the knowledge and practices around casabe were inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. Very few foods can claim an unbroken line of production from before European contact to a supermarket shelf.
Commercial casabe is sold in Dominican, Venezuelan, and Colombian shops in large thin discs and in small rounds. It is entirely respectable to buy it. A thicker casabe, up to a centimetre, is made in parts of Venezuela and eaten as a more substantial bread; the thin brittle version is the Antillean one. A sweet version exists in the Dominican Republic, brushed with coconut milk and sugar and toasted, and is eaten as a snack rather than as bread. The pressed liquid should be discarded here, since with sweet cassava there is not enough starch worth recovering, but the white sediment can be dried for tapioca if you have pressed a large batch.
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