charged with sago starch passes on to a trough, with a
depression in the centre, where the sediment is deposited,
the surplus water trickling off by a shallow outlet. When
the trough is nearly full, the mass of starch, which has a
slight reddish tinge, is made into cylinders of about thirty
pounds’ weight, and neatly covered with sago leaves, and
in this state is sold as raw sago.
Boiled with water this forms a thick glutinous mass,
with a rather astringent taste, and is eaten with salt,
limes, and chilies. Sago-bread is made in large quantities,
by baking it into cakes in a small clay oven
containing six or eight slits side by side, each about
three-quarters of an inch wide, and six or eight inches
square. The raw sago is broken up, dried in the sun,
powdered, and finely sifted. The oven is heated over a
clear fire of embers, and is lightly filled with the sago-
powder. The openings are then covered with a flat piece
of sago bark, and in about
five minutes the cakes are
turned out sufficiently baked.
The hot cakes are very nice
with butter, and when made
with the addition of a little
sugar and grated cocoa-nut
are quite a delicacy. They are soft, and something like
corn-flour cakes, but have a slight characteristic flavour
which is lost in the refined sago we use in this country.
When not wanted for immediate use, they are dried for
several days in the sun, and tied up in bundles of twenty.
They will then keep for years ; they are very hard,
and very rough and dry, but the people are used to them
from infancy, and little children may be seen gnawing at
them as contentedly as ours with their bread-and-butter.
If dipped in water and then toasted, they become almost as
good as when fresh baked; and thus treated they were my
daily substitute for bread with my coffee. Soaked and
boiled they make a very good pudding or vegetable, and
served well • to economize our rice, which is sometimes
difficult to get so far east.
It is truly an extraordinary sight to witness a whole
tree-trank, perhaps twenty feet long and four or five in
circumference, converted into food with so little labour
and preparation. A good-sized tree will produce thirty
tomans or bundles of thirty pounds each, and each toman
will make sixty cakes of three to the pound. Two of
these cakes are as much as a man can eat at one meal, and
five are considered a full day’s allowance ; so that, reckoning
a tree to produce 1,800 c a k e s , weighing 600 pounds, it
will supply a man with food for a whole year. The labour
to produce this is very moderate. Two men will finish a
tree in five days, and two women will bake the whole into
cakes in five days more ; but the raw sago will keep very