Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/375

 Taking all the various articles of food into account, we find that, after game, ordinary kaffir-corn, kleen-corn, maize, and gourds hold a foremost place; next comes fish; then follow in diminished proportions, sour milk, fresh milk, beef, mutton, goats’ flesh, forty-two species of wild fruits, the two kinds of beans, ground-nuts, fowls, wild birds, manza and honey. Meat is generally boiled in covered earthenware pots, or roasted in the embers, either with or without a spit. In their way of dressing meat, the people are really very clever, and I do not believe that dishes so savoury could be found throughout South Africa as those which are served in the better-class residences of the Marutse, and this is the more surprising when it is remembered that they lead a far more secluded life than any of the Bechuana tribes.

Wild birds are either roasted or boiled, and served up with their head-feathers or crests unremoved, on handsome perforated dishes. Many tribes reject certain kinds of wild game through superstitious motives; some will not touch the pallah; others will not eat the eland; and still more refuse to taste hippopotamus-meat; while, on the other hand, there are some of the Marutse people who enjoy the flesh of certain wild beasts of prey which the great majority of South Africans would hold to be utterly revolting. Both meat and fish are dried and preserved without undergoing any salting process. The various kinds of corn are either boiled or pounded in mortars, and then made into pap with milk or water, maize being boiled or baked, both in its green and dried state. Beans are boiled, and earth-nuts baked; gourds and water-melons are cut up and