Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/332

316 The housekeeping leaves much to be desired. One of the prominent characteristics of the people is to build and not keep up. This applies to their monuments, their houses, their boats, and their objects of art. But they do some cleaning, and use in it brooms made of the median nerves of palm-leaves and of cocoanut-fibers. They do very little in the evening. Their labors are performed during the day, which in that latitude is of nearly even length the year round. But if a man wishes to light his house or travel by night, he can use various torches, the most common of which is made of dried palm-leaves, tied together and steeped in resin. They are good enough to go around by, and are identical with the torches used by the natives of the Malabar coast. When they want a more steady light in the house they make little candles by dipping a cotton wick in melted wax and working it in the hand. This is really an article of luxury and is usually employed only before the altars in ancestral worship.

The Cambodian lives on rice and fish, and drinks water. Every other article of food or drink is to him only an accessory. Cambodian rice is one of the poorest kinds, being small and generally mixed with hard grains. It is thrashed out roughly, and is decorticated only as it is used. Fish is eaten fresh or salted, and, as the fishing-season is constant, there is always plenty of it, with a considerable surplus for exportation. The "extras" are chickens, eggs, pork, vegetables, and fruits, the chief of which is the banana. Tea is rarely taken at meals, but is served during the day, and offered to visitors. But little use is made of fermented liquors, and drunkenness is very rare. The liquor met most frequently is an alcohol of rice perfumed with essence of roses, which is known as chum-chum.

Their cookery is so strongly spiced that it is repulsive to Europeans. The Cambodian addresses himself by turns to pepper, ginger, mace, and various spices; but it costs the foreigner a long exercise to endure them. These, however, are condiments to which we are accustomed, and the only difference between our habits and theirs is in the quantity. But it is a different affair when we come to a product which the Cambodian likes well enough to set everywhere—the nuocman, or oil of fermented fish. The Annamites use this, too, but they refine it. The Cambodian prefers for his sauce to have it of the most pronounced flavor, without its having undergone any filtration or other process to attenuate its taste or odor. Offensive as it is at the first interview, I have known Europeans to learn to like it and to eat it with relish.

Instead of fireplace and chimney, the Cambodians use ingeniously constructed portable furnaces of terra-cotta. I find in this another illustration of the fact I have already referred to, that the inundation, by compelling the Cambodian to be a water-man for a part of the year, has given a special direction to his industry, the characteristic feature of which is the invention of portable utensils equally adapted to service