Cassava

Toasted meal stirred into the pulp is how the Amazon actually eats it, with salt.

Garlic, sour orange and hot oil poured over boiled root. Acid is the seasoning.

Tapioca gum sits in the bottom of the cuia, thick and blank, and lets the leaf do the talking.

Pounded together in a wooden mortar until the toasted meal takes up the meat fat.

Cassava starch brings no flavour and no salt, so the half-cured Minas is the entire seasoning.

Broth and gum come off the same pressed root. One is the liquid, the other is the glue.

Waxy starch flattens everything; only sharp citrus survives the boil intact.

Fried in oil until nutty, then poured over. The root has no flavour to fight.

Fat is the missing element; starch plus milk sets into something almost custard.

Starch to blot the pot liquor. Toasted flour does what rice cannot.

Sour orange cuts the waxiness and stops the starch from gluing the mouth shut.

Toast the meal in it until sandy. Fat is what makes farofa worth eating.

Farinha over the top for grit. Root and leaf off one plant, on one plate.

Spooned into a starch crepe straight off the dry pan, where a firm cheese would sit there and stay firm.

Grill the root beside it. Dry bland starch is exactly what a salty squeaking curd is missing.

Fruity heat with nothing to compete against; the root is a pure delivery system.

Salt and glutamate in a dry crumb, which is exactly what the starch lacks.

Farofa takes the sting off a plate the way bread takes it off a mouth.

Toasted into gari, the starch takes the colour and a faint smell of violets.

Bland starch, sweet fat, salt. The Caribbean and Kerala reached this separately.

Tapioca pearls need sugar and fat suspended, not dissolved. Milk does both.

Grassy vanilla against wet starch; the Southeast Asian cassava cake move.

Salted roe over toasted meal: farofa logic built from Mediterranean parts.