Indigenous cuisine of the Americas

I've discovered some interesting things about the diet of the Taino peoples who populated the Greater Antilles, so I can share that.

First, while many civilizations were grain cultures (based on wheat, barely, maize, etc.), theirs was based around tubers.

Tubers are root plants, such as potatoes, yams, yucca/manioc/Cassava, and other lesser known plants.

The Taino emigrated to the Caribbean from the Amazon river basin thousands of years ago. They brought to the Caribbean both a language related to that of the Arawak, and the tradition of agriculture based around tubers.

Their staple good was a variant of yucca. It would be grown in mounds, referred to as 'montones' (which has acquired the popular meaning of 'a lot'). The specific variant they were using around the time of the conquest was actually poisonous, requiring a special treatment before being edible.

The yucca would be harvested and ground into a messy pulp. The pulp would be placed into what looked like enormous Chinese finger traps so their liquids could be strained and the pulp could dry. The finger trap looking things would be suspended vertically and slowly spun tighter and tighter to extract as much of the liquid as possible. Something about prolonged exposure to air appears to cause some kind of chemical reaction which neutralizes the toxic elements in that variant of yucca.

The liquids, once extracted and made safe through exposure to the air, could be fermented and drunk. The dried ground yucca left in the 'finger trap' looking thing would be used as the main ingredient to make yucca bread, called casabe.

I talk about this with Professor Antonio Curet in this episode of the AskHistorians Podcast.

When Spain first conquered Cuba, they readily adopted Yucca as a staple of their diet. Turned out that yucca survived long voyages at sea longer and better than flour, which had a tendency to rot away given the storage limitations of the time. Casabe bread was a staple of the sailors who passed through Havana on their way to the Americas as bureaucrats or back to Spain as a part of the treasure fleet (Havana was the last stop before crossing the Atlantic).

The Taino supplemented their agriculture with hunting and fishing, mostly small birds and rodents on land and large fish and turtles along the coasts.

I recommend Levi Marrero's Cuba: Economia y Sociedad, volume 1, and Alejandro de la Fuente's Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century.

Hope that at least partially answers your question.