Bartolomé de las Casas at the table

Las Casas's life is divided between two ways of eating. On one side, the Dominican pitanza: the regulated convent meal, frugal, eaten in silence at the refectory, around a pottage, bread, and a little fish on lean days. On the other, the mesa of the Indies: what he discovers and describes himself on Hispaniola and then in Chiapas, where cassava casabe replaces wheat bread and the flavors of the New World enter the Spanish plate. A "Las Casas" meal therefore has no starter-main-dessert: it is a bridge between the sobriety of the Castilian cloister and the strange abundance of the American lands.

Las Casas's signature ingredient is yuca (cassava) baked into casabe flatbread on the burén, the large clay disc of the Taíno. He himself described it in his *Historia de las Indias*: a "bread" without wheat, which keeps for months and nourishes both Indian and colonist. It is the frontier food between the Old and New Worlds.