Recipes with cassava

Cassava is a root that is never eaten raw: it always needs cooking, and often the soaking or grating-and-pressing that comes before. That constraint shaped every dish below. Where a potato is happy with a pan of water, cassava produced whole techniques — ferment, press, dry, granulate — and each cuisine kept its own version.

Two families emerge. On one side the root simply boiled and served in pieces, like Cuban yuca con mojo, dressed with garlic and citrus straight out of the water, or pounded into an elastic paste in Ivorian foutou banane. On the other, the root transformed before it ever cooks: grated, pressed and fermented, it becomes the couscous-like grain of attiéké with vegetables and attoukpou, or the dense flatbread of Jamaican bammy. The starch on its own heads for the sweet end: enyucados and Colombian buñuelos.

When buying, one rule: the root should be firm and the flesh a clean white. Cut it in half before peeling — the brown skin and the pink layer beneath come away far better with a knife than a peeler, and the fibrous cord down the middle pulls out after cooking. Any grey or bluish streak in the flesh gets cut away generously.