Taste Paraguay
Paraguay
A landlocked, Guaraní-speaking country whose cooking turns corn, cassava and fresh cheese into breads nobody else makes.
Paraguayan food is built on corn, mandioca (cassava) and queso Paraguay, a salty fresh cheese that goes into nearly everything. Sopa paraguaya and chipa guasú are savoury corn puddings; chipa is cassava-starch cheese bread; mbeju is a cassava-and-cheese griddle cake. Beef is grilled as asado and stewed into so'o yosopy and vori vori soup with cheese dumplings. Boiled mandioca sits where bread would elsewhere. Tereré, cold yerba mate, is drunk all day. Sweets lean on dulce de leche, peanuts and guava.
2 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 2
Regional cuisines
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Take the Paraguay food quizFood history
The Guaraní grew corn and cassava and gave the country its language and its food words. Spanish settlers intermarried early, and the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced cattle, dairy and wheat on a large scale, which is where the cheese-and-starch breads come from. The War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s devastated the country and fixed a frugal, resourceful home kitchen. Yerba mate, native to the region, became both economy and ritual.