When I was a kid in Buenos Aires, cassava barely existed.
If you asked most people what yuca was, they probably wouldn't know. It was something associated with northern Argentina, not with the grills and family barbecues I grew up with.
Everything changed when I started travelling through Brazil as a teenager.
One of the trips that stayed with me forever was crossing part of the Amazon on a local ferry. It wasn't a cruise or a tourist attraction. It was simply how people travelled between villages. Hundreds of hammocks were tied side by side across the decks, the engine never seemed to stop, and for almost two weeks that hammock was my bed.
The menu barely changed. Every single day there were beans, cassava, farinha de mandioca and a banana.
At first I couldn't believe we were eating the same thing again. A few days later I understood why. Cassava isn't just food there; it's part of everyday life. By the end of the journey I wasn't tired of it anymore. I had fallen in love with it.
Depending on where you are in the world you'll hear different names. In Argentina it's usually called yuca. In Brazil it's mandioca. In English you'll most often see cassava. They're all the same root.
Cassava appears everywhere in South American cooking. Tapioca starch comes from it. Farinha de mandioca is served with feijoada. Even pão de queijo depends on it, and there's also mandioquinha, a sweeter cousin that's delicious in its own right.
Years later, after moving to London, I started cooking with cassava regularly. Here it's easy to find thanks to the city's African and South American communities, and many supermarkets even sell it peeled and frozen.
People often ask me what the secret is.
It isn't the frying.
It's the boiling.
I cook the cassava in well-salted water until it is completely tender, but not falling apart. Then I remove the fibrous core, cut it into thick batons, freeze it, and when I need it, it goes straight into hot oil.
No thawing.
No double frying.
Unlike my Argentine fries, I don't add garlic or parsley. Cassava has enough personality on its own.
Today, whenever I cater an Argentine barbecue, I usually offer people a choice: traditional Argentine fries or cassava chips.
I always expect the potatoes to win.
Instead, the cassava almost always disappears first.
I serve it with a lightly spiced mayonnaise made with yoghurt, and somebody always ends up asking what those strange chips were.
It still makes me smile.
I never imagined that an ingredient I discovered while crossing the Amazon would one day become one of the side dishes people remember most after an Argentine barbecue in a London garden.