For some reason chickens, like wine, refuse to age properly in the South Pacific. It may be the heat, it may be the humidity; at any rate a chicken of greater age than two months, however cooked, makes a piece de resistance in a most painfully literal sense. Luckily, the Tahitian pig, cooked in island fashion, is as much above the average porker of temperate latitudes as the Tahitian broiler falls below the standard in his class. Any kind of a cut from a six-months-old coconut-fed pig, cooked on hot stones and served with the inimitable miti-hari sauce, will awaken an ecstasy in the palate the memory of which cannot be eradicated by a lifetime of gastronomic experience with the most vaunted viands of other climes. The recipe for preparing this incomparable delicacy would be about as follows:
Dig a hole in the ground big enough comfortably to bury a pig in and fill it with smooth, round river-bottom stones. Collect half a cord or so of dry wood and start a fire on the stones. Leaving a boy to stoke the fire, take the eight or ten hours in which the stones are coming to a dull cherry red to find just the right sort of a pig. From three to six months is the best age, and, if possible, get an animal that has been penned and fed upon nothing but young coconuts. If there has been a few odd bread-fruits, bananas, mangoes, papayas, avocados, star-apples and the like thrown in to him occasionally it will not make much difference, but avoid the young porker that has rustled for himself about the copra shacks and along the beach.
Kill the pig and dress in the usual manner, but without cutting off the head and feet or removing the skin. Wrap the body several inches deep in banana or plantain leaves and plaster the whole thickly with sticky mud. Then, if the stones are red, remove them with a pole, throw in the wrapped pig and push them back again. Best to let a native watch the progress of the cooking, as a great deal depends upon taking out the pig at the right time, and a lifetime of experience is required to forecast the precise condition to which it is roasted from a whiff of the steam.
You might try your hand with miti-hari before leaving the rest of the feast for the natives to prepare. This is the sauce par excellence of the South Pacific, and, as far as my own experience goes, quite without a peer in any other part of the world. Send for a quart of grated coconut meat (most of the native houses keep it on hand), and after soaking it for a few minutes in sea water, pour out on a square of stout muslin, twist the corners of the latter together and bring all the pressure possible to bear on the contents. The result is a cupful of thick, rich milk which, on the addition of the juice of a couple of limes and a red pepper or two, becomes the marvellous and transmutative miti-hari.
I recall hearing in Papeete a story concerning the amazing things that tourists have eaten under the gastronomic intoxication incident to tasting the wonderful miti sauce with which they—the things—were dressed. I believe a piece of rubber blanket was on the list. I don't exactly recall what else, though I do remember hearing Claribel say that a dash of miti-hari on the story itself might make it easier to swallow. But Claribel, unduly proud of her own salad dressings, was somewhat prejudiced against the incomparable Tahitian sauce.
The Tahitian "native" feast does not differ in any salient particulars from the often-described Hawaiian luau. The guests sit on the ground and eat the various "dishes," which are spread before them on banana leaves, from their fingers. In addition to pig, chicken and the inevitable breadfruit, the menu always includes a liberal supply of fish, both cooked in ti leaves and pickled raw in lime juice; taro, boiled and mashed; bananas and plantain of a dozen different varieties; fillet of squid, very exquisite prawns and your choice of a score of varieties of strange and delicious tropical fruits with unwritable names.
If the feast is given you by a person of wealth and importance, or if you are paying a chief like the canny Ori a sum sufficient to make it an inducement, you may get a taste of coconut sprout salad. The raw fish is far from unpalatable and the prawns are exquisite, but the coco sprout salad is the only dish of the lot worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the miti-hari-ed pig. Unfortunately, as every tiny sprout in the salad means the death of a young coco palm, the dish is more often discussed than digested. A substitute made of the tender fronds of young ferns is itself pretty near a high-water mark until you have tasted that from coco sprouts. As for the coco-fed pig and the miti-hari dressing, if it doesn't prepare your face for a look of distant superiority whenever again you hear men extolling this or that culinary achievement as worthy of place on the top-most pinnacle of gastronomic excellence, it is because you are suffering from atrophy of the palate.
Kava, so popular in the Samoas and Fiji, was not—Byron to the contrary notwithstanding—and is not, drunk in Tahiti. Feasting with natives outside of missionary circles, you will probably have a chance to "experience" orange wine. This is a harmless-looking beverage of insinuating ways, in the lucent depths of the first three or four coco shell cups of which lurks no hint of the devil who is curled up in the bottom of the fifth or sixth, and all thereafter. The proverbial ungentlemanliness of the onslaught of a "battleship" punch upon a débutante at her first dance on board is nothing to the "assault from ambush" of orange wine upon the unwary stranger who dallies overlong above its cup.
Coco wine—not the coco toddy that figured in my Marquesan pig hunt, which is a baser concoction—fermented from a juice drawn from the heart of the trunk of that palm, is expensive and hard to obtain at any cost. It is a gentleman's drink, however, and scorns to practise any of the "behind-the-back" tactics of the soft-footed orange thunderbolt. It romps down the throat like a torch-light procession and promptly starts a conflagration that spreads like wild-fire from the head to the heels. An American Indian after a couple of epus of coco wine would commence murdering his fellows, as he does under the influence of the fiery mescal; the gentle Tahitian in like instance, though quite as much uplifted, both mentally and physically, as the redskin, is content to murder sleep—his own and every one's else. He enters upon a period of song and dance which lasts as long as the supply of wine, and there is no peace within a quarter-mile radius of the centre of disturbance.
In America or Europe a man showing the same symptoms as does a Kanaka under the influence of coco wine would be gagged, strait-jacketed and thrust into a padded cell. In Tahiti the smiling policeman, if the offender becomes too boisterously obstreperous, accomplishes a similar result by pitching him into the sea. At first blush this strikes one as being a somewhat drastic proceeding, but the Tahitian, being amphibious, rarely comes to harm in the water. Indeed, I have the assurance of a prominent merchant of Papeete that "you would be surprised how few of these ducked natives are really drowned!" I will return to the Tahitian in his "lighter moments" in another chapter.