A Thanksgiving Dish That’s a Delicious Nod to Brazil

On Christmas Day in Macaé, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the kitchen was the gathering place for Thailine Kolb, her cousins, her mother and her aunts. While the children ran around, the women, dressed in matching aprons, prepared a holiday dinner. Mrs. Kolb remembers sprinkling salt on dishes and mashing pounds of yuca for one of her favorite holiday dishes: purê de mandioca, or yuca purée.

But now, about a decade since she moved to the United States, this purée has a deeper meaning on her Thanksgiving table, representing her culture amid the dishes of her husband’s family. Not only is it an easy substitute for mashed potatoes, it’s a natural way for her to incorporate her country’s flavors, like many other immigrants do, on the holiday.

“I like the taste better,” said Mrs. Kolb, 33, of New Haven, Conn. When she started making the dish five years ago for Thanksgiving with her then-boyfriend’s family, she would call her mother, Liomar dos Santos Paula Araujo, in Brazil, who taught her how to boil, mash and make the yuca rich with butter and milk over the phone.

Yuca, the root of the cassava plant, can be found in many of the country’s dishes. Once its tough outer bark is peeled away, the starchy white flesh within can be boiled, mashed, fried like a French fry or even used as a flour.

The crop likely originated in Brazil and was a staple for Indigenous people living in the Amazon Basin and the foothills of the Andes Mountains, said Darna L. Dufour, a retired anthropology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.