p. [119].
Sakai cookery does not require much study or experience.
The vegetable food they have at their disposition consists of: sweet potatoes, yams, maize, sikoi, different bulbs and tubers that they find in the forest like we do truffles, many edible leaves and all sorts of fruit, mushrooms, nanka, guaccicous, guà pra,[9] etc. Rice is an imported luxury which they use when they can get it.
Here are the necessaries for a variety of dishes, but the Sakais know no variety in the culinary art and with the exception of the fruit, the yams and potatoes that are cooked under the hot ashes, the whole lot is put, with a little water, into cooking-pots made out of large bamboo canes, and boiled up together into a kind of paste with pieces of serpents, rats, toads, lizards, beetles and other similar delicacies to give it flavour.
The monkey, deer, wild-boar, wild-sheep and any other big game caught in traps they just burn at the fire without taking the trouble to skin the animal, and then they eat it nearly raw.
They season the meat with salt, when they have any, which is not often, and with a capsicum that sets your mouth on fire. The use of this capsicum, and the continual chewing of tobacco, and betel has ruined the palate of the Sakais, and left them with little power of relishing.
Fish is rarely seen at the board (I use the word in a figurative sense as the thing it signifies does not exist for them) of the mountain tribes for the double motive that they have no fishing tackle and their fear of the water makes them avoid it as much as possible. Nevertheless when there is a dearth of other food they will throw in some beaten ple-pra and the fish, of a fair size, that rise to the surface to bite it are deftly hit by a knife, the Sakai seldom failing in his mark.
To the simplicity of their cooking corresponds the still greater simplicity of their drinks which are—of the singular number.
The inhabitants of the forest drink nothing but water but this they require clear and fresh. Should it not be perfectly pure in colour and taste they will not drink it. They always seek a spring to satisfy their thirst and supply their families with the necessary liquid.