Cooked in families and sold everywhere in the street, the chipa, this small cassava bread with an elastic texture, has been the star of the border region between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil for more than four hundred years. The website Nea Hoy looks back at the history of this bread, national food of Paraguay since 2015.
With a coffee at tea time, as an accompaniment to lunch, or enjoyed on its own while walking down the street, there is no time for chipa (or chipa, depending on the region). This elastic dough bun made of cassava, milk and cheese is the favorite food of the large border area between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Its origin recounts the mixture of populations that the region has known throughout its history.
“According to several sources, the ancestor of the chipa is the mbujape, tells the local media Nea Hoy. It was a bread made by the Guarani natives by grating raw cassava and baking it wrapped in leaves of gray (corn), bananas or jaguarundi, a medicinal plant with the taste of anise, on ashes. When hot, cassava starch becomes rubbery, and this consistency is called ‘chipa’ in Quechua. The introduction to the Guarani culture of bovine cattle, brought by the Jesuit missions [au XVIIe siècle] allowed the local cuisine to incorporate
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