Stones over a wood fire,
and left there until the contents are done, or more properly
speaking, until the lady in charge of it has delusions on the point,
and the bottom rolls are a trifle burnt or the whole insufficiently
cooked.
This manioc meal is the staple food, the bread equivalent, all along
the coast. As you pass along you are perpetually meeting with a new
named food, fou-fou on the Leeward, kank on the Windward, m'vada in
Corisco, ogooma in the Ogowe; but acquaintance with it demonstrates
that it is all the same - manioc.
It is a good food when it is properly prepared; but when a village
has soaked its soil-laden manioc tubers in one and the same pool of
water for years, the water in that pool becomes a trifle strong, and
both it and the manioc get a smell which once smelt is never to be
forgotten; it is something like that resulting from bad paste with a
dash of vinegar, but fit to pass all these things, and has qualities
of its own that have no civilised equivalent.
I believe that this way of preparing the staple article of diet is
largely responsible for that dire and frequent disease "cut him
belly," and several other quaint disorders, possibly even for the
sleep disease. The natives themselves say that a diet too
exclusively maniocan produces dimness of vision, ending in blindness
if the food is not varied; the poisonous principle cannot be
anything like soaked out in the surcharged water, and the meal when
it is made up and cooked has just the same sour, acrid taste you
would expect it to have from the smell.
The fish is boiled, or wrapped in leaves and baked. The dried fish,
very properly known as stink-fish, is much preferred; this is either
eaten as it is, or put into stews as seasoning, as also are the
snails. The meat is eaten either fresh or smoked, boiled or baked.
By baked I always mean just buried in the ground and a fire lighted
on top, or wrapped in leaves and buried in hot embers.
The smoked meat is badly prepared, just hung up in the smoke of the
fires, which hardens it, blackening the outside quickly; but when
the lumps are taken out of the smoke, in a short time cracks occur
in them, and the interior part proceeds to go bad, and needless to
say maggoty. If it is kept in the smoke, as it often is to keep it
out of the way of dogs and driver ants, it acquires the toothsome
taste and texture of a piece of old tarpaulin.
Now I will ask the surviving reader who has waded through this
dissertation on cookery if something should not be done to improve
the degraded condition of the Bantu cooking culture?
