casabe

Casabe is the oldest documented food word in the Caribbean. The Taíno people of Hispaniola made a crisp flatbread from pressed, dried yuca and called it kasabi or cazabi; Columbus recorded the name in his journal in December 1492, making it one of the first indigenous American food words to enter the written European record. The bread itself had been a Taíno staple for centuries before that encounter.

Making casabe requires removing the hydrogen cyanide from bitter cassava root. The Taíno used a basketwork tube called a tipití to wring the starchy mass dry, pressing out the toxic juice. The remaining dried pulp was spread thin on a ceramic griddle and baked into flat, crackerlike rounds that could last months without spoiling. This was a sophisticated food technology that converted a poisonous root into a durable bread capable of feeding communities across the Greater Antilles and much of South America.

Spanish colonizers adopted casabe rapidly. It kept better than wheat bread in tropical heat, it was local and abundant, and it required no grain imports from Europe. By the early sixteenth century, Spanish forts and ships in the Caribbean were provisioned with casabe alongside salt pork and olive oil. Bartolomé de las Casas, writing around 1530, described the preparation in detail and noted that the Spanish had come to prefer it over European bread on long voyages.

The word survived the near-destruction of the Taíno people. After epidemic disease and colonial violence reduced the indigenous population of Hispaniola from several hundred thousand to a few thousand within two generations, the bread and its name persisted, absorbed into Dominican, Cuban, and Venezuelan cooking. Casabe is made today in the same communities and by the same methods that Columbus observed: the tipití, the griddle, the long-lasting disc.