On The Road - Belém (Pt.5) - Manioc, Let Me Count the Ways

As we mentioned in last Friday's post about the three cornerstones of the cuisine of Belém, the staple carbohydrate upon which the cuisine in built is the tropical tuber manioc (Manihot esculenta), alternatively known in English as cassava or sometimes yuca. Manioc is to Belenense cooking what rice is to Chinese, wheat is to Italian cooking and the potatoes is to Irish - the supplier of the major portion of the population's daily nutritional intake. In the Amazonian region of Brazil, where Belém is located, up to 33% of the daily caloric intake comes from manioc in some form or another.

Bitter manioc tuber

What is most astonishing about this tuber, first domesticated in the southwestern portion of the Amazonian basin as long as ten thousand years ago, is its chameleon-like nature. Manioc shows up in all kinds of shapes, forms and consistencies in Belém and it's hard to imagine that two dishes as different as the soupy broth called tacacá and the crunchy, gritty flour called farinha that is sprinkled on top of grilled meats share a common ingredient. And that ingredient could only be manioc. Manioc can look like mashed potatoes, as when it tops arrumadinho, the Brazilian take on shepherd's pie. It can look just like french fries. Or it can be an airy, light form of bread - as in Brazilian  pão de queijo. It even makes an appearance at North American dessert tables, disguised as tapioca pudding. Those pearly balls in the pudding are manioc, as are the "bubbles" in Asian bubble tea. It's an infinitely versatile food, and the cooking of Belém would be radically different without it.

Producers, vendors and cooks of manioc in Belém sort manioc plants into two types, normally called sweet (doce) or bitter (amargo). It's a good thing that they do, too, for bitter manioc is highly poisonous in its natural, uncooked form. Both types of manioc contain cyanide poison in their tubers, roots and leaves, but the quantity is much less in sweet manioc. A kilogram of sweet manioc contains approximately 20 mg. of hydrogen cyanide, but the same quantity of bitter manioc can contain 50 times as much. Since as little as 40 mg. of this chemical can be fatal, bitter manioc is toxic indeed.

Fortunately, the toxins present in bitter manioc can be removed by processing and cooking the plant, something that Amerindians discovered at the time they first domesticated manioc. This detoxification can be accomplished by long cooking - the technique that's used when cooking manioc leaves, which must be cooked for an entire week without stopping before they are served. Tubers are processed by mashing or milling the root, then squeezing out the liquid which contains most of the toxins, and cooking the remainder.

Ground manioc leaves, Ver-o-peso market, Belém

Brazilian Portuguese makes it easy to differentiate between sweet manioc and bitter, though there are regional dialectical differences which cloud the picture. The bitter type is called mandioca, from a Tupi word that is also the basis for English manioc. Sweet manioc is called mandioca-doce, mandionca-mansa, macaxeira, or aipim depending on region. In English, dangerously, both bitter and sweet are called manioc or cassava.

Tucupi, Ver-o-peso market, Belém

As we explore the gastronomy of Belém in this series of On The Road posts, we'll run into manioc again and again. It already showed up in a liquid form in yesterday's recipe for pato no tucupi (duck in tucupi). Tucupi is made by squeezing the liquid from bitter manioc tubers, then letting the liquid sit until the starch settles out and can be removed. The remaining liquid is cooked to rid it of poisons, resulting in  tucupi. That settled starch, by the way, is later dried and becomes tapioca. Just one more transformation of this remarkable plant.

The Case of the Two Maniocs

Yesterday, there was a post here on Flavors of Brazil about the confusing nomenclature for the staple food plant cassava (or manioc, or yuca, etc. etc.) Let's hope that faithful readers of this blog will have already studied and memorized that post to avoid further confusion.

The situation, however, it's quite as clear as it was made out to be in that post, because there is not just one plant that carries all those names, there are two. And the difference between the two of them is not insignificant by any means - because one is poisonous if not detoxified and the other is safe to eat in its natural state. Consequently, being able to correct distinguish between the two maniocs is a serious business, as an incorrect choice may be fatal.

Both plants have the same botanical genus - Manihot. The species that carries toxins is Manihot esculenta and that innocuous one is Manihot utilissima. In English, the two species are generally called bitter cassava and sweet cassava, respectively, and in Brazil, the toxic Manihot esculenta is generally known as mandioca and the non-toxic Manihot utilissima is called mandioca doce, macaxeira, or aipim.

The toxic properties of some members of this plant genus were long known to native American populations, who learned how to remove the toxins from the plant before consuming it. Variations of these techniques are still used today worldwide. Whatever treatment is used, the important thing is to remove cyanide from the plant, as ingestion of raw roots or leaves can cause severe and chronic illness, or even death. Toxins are removed naturally from the plant when it undergoes soaking in water, cooking or fermentation. Variations on all three of these techniques are used both at home and in industrial processing.

One of the most intriguing techniques for detoxifying cassava is one that native Indians used for fermenting cassava into a drink. It was described by anthropologist and shamanism scholar Michael J. Harner this way:

The sweet manioc beer (nihamanci or nijiamanchi), is prepared by first peeling and washing the tubers in the stream near the garden. Then the water and manioc are brought to the house, where the tubers are cut up and put in a pot to boil. … The manioc is then mashed and stirred to a soft consistency with the aid of a special wooden paddle. While the woman stirs the mash, she chews handfuls of and spits them back into the pot, a process that may take half an hour or longer. After the mash has been prepared it is transferred to a beer storage jar and left to ferment. … The resultant liquid tastes somewhat like a pleasingly alcoholic buttermilk and is most refreshing. The Jivarosw consider it to be far superior to plain water, which they drink only in emergencies.

This technique of masticating food to initiate fermentation is one used throughout the world from Asia and Africa as far north as the Arctic, where it was known to the Inuit.

In the next post on this blog, I'll provide a traditional recipe for a dish that used cassava leaves, which shows just how much care, effort and time are required to make cassava safe to eat.

Manioc's Many Names

For a long time I have been wanted to post some articles here on Flavors of Brazil about the plant that was the staple food of Brazil's Indians prior to the arrival of Europeans, and which today is still a daily source of nutrition for millions of Brazilians, and billions more residing in tropical areas of the planet. The botanical name for the genus is Manihot, a name derived from the name of the plant in the Tupi language, a native American language spoken in many areas of South America. In Tupi, the plant is called mandioca.

This plant goes by an incredible number of names throughout the world, and much of the taxonomy is confusing, with one name referring to possibly two or more varieties in differing locations, and with countless regional or linguistic variations for the name of one single botanical species. In order to begin to discuss mandioca on this blog, some sense will have to be made out of this linguistic and botanical bowl of spaghetti - some untangling of the plant's many names.

In English, three names are commonly given to the plant - cassava, yuca and manioc (note that cassava is sometimes spelled cassaba or cassada). The second of these names, yuca, is shared with most of the Spanish-speaking cultures of the Americas, such as Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, and The Dominican Republic. In Brazil, there are rather more than three common names - just to list a few: aipi, aipim, castelinha, macaxeira, mandioca-doce, mandioca-mansa, maniva, maniveira, pão-de-pobre. In Africa and Asia, where the plant is widely consumed, it has many, many more names.

Besides this overabundance of names denominating the plant itself, there are many more for each of the constituent edible parts of the plant - leaves, roots, etc. - and for the products derived from the plant, such as starches, flours, gums, saps. These will all have to be dealt with in due course, but will be left for later postings.