Yerba Mate

The Guaraní, spread across what is now Paraguay, northeastern Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay, drank mate in pre-Columbian times, toasting and drying the leaf of Ilex paraguariensis and steeping it in a gourd sipped through a cane straw. That is the same basic vessel and technique still used today ^{1 2}. Spanish colonisers recorded the practice from the fifteenth century onward, and it spread through the wider Southern Cone over the following two centuries ¹.

The plant's path to cultivation was not straightforward. Spanish authorities banned the drink at first, suspicious of an indigenous practice they did not control, before Jesuit missionaries reversed that position once they saw how widely it was valued ². From the mid-seventeenth century, Jesuit missions went further and domesticated the plant outright, establishing plantations within their reducciones in the Argentine province of Misiones. This was a shift from wild harvesting to organised agriculture that outlasted the Jesuits' own expulsion from the region in the 1770s ¹.

The gourd and metal straw, called the bombilla, are not incidental tableware but the mechanism the drink depends on: the straw acts as both sipping tube and filter, holding back the loose leaf while letting the liquid through ¹. Drinking is built around sharing a single gourd rather than individual servings; one person, the cebador, refills and passes it round a circle, and the etiquette runs in reverse of what a Western table would expect: a drinker who says thank you is understood to be declining another turn, not offering thanks for the one just finished ¹. What had been a rural custom moved into cities across the twentieth century, helped in the 1960s by the introduction, in Uruguay, of the insulated flask that let the hot water travel with the drinker rather than staying by the kettle ².