Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/244

 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. I have gone into this bush cooking here in detail, so that you may understand why on the Coast, when a man comes in and says he has been down on native chop, we say "Good gracious!" and give out the best tins on the spot.

I may be judging the coast tribes too harshly if I include them with the bush tribes in my culinary indictment, so I confine my accusations to the Fans and up-river tribes, with whose culinary methods I have been more in contact, for when on the coast I have been either in European houses, or in those of educated natives who have partially, at any rate, adopted European ways of cooking, and I must say that among the M'pongwe and Igalwas I came across a bright ray of intelligence—nay, I will say genius, in the matter of Odeaka cheese. It is not cheese, but, as the schoolboy said anent the author of the Iliad, somebody else of the same name; but it is good,