Roasting is usually effected by making a fire, letting it die down into red-hot ashes, and then putting the food without wrap or covering into the ashes, turning it from time to time. They also roast by holding the food on sticks in the flame of the burning fire, turning it occasionally. Stone cooking is adopted for pig and other meats. They make a big fire, on the top of which they spread the stones; when the stones are hot enough, they remove some of them, place the meat without wrap or covering on the others, then place the removed stones on the meat, and finally pile on these stones a big covering of leaves to keep in the heat. Stone cooking in the gardens is done in a slightly different way; there they dig in the ground a round hole about 1 foot deep and from 1½ to 2 feet in diameter, and in this hole they make their fire, on which they pile their stones; and the rest of the process is the same as before. This hole-making process is never adopted in the village. The only reason for it which was suggested was that the method was quicker, and that in the gardens they are in a hurry. Of course, holes of this sort dug in the open village enclosure would be a source of danger, especially at night.
Boiling is done in pieces of bamboo about 4 inches in diameter and about 15 or 18 inches long. They fill these with water, put the food into them, and then place or hold the bamboo stems in a slanting position in the flames. This method is specially used for cooking sweet potatoes, but it is their only method of boiling anything. Water, which they keep stored and carry in bamboo receptacles and hollow pumpkins, is boiled in bamboo stems in the same way. The bamboo storage vessels are generally from 2 to 5 feet long, the intersecting nodes, other than that at one end, having been removed. The pumpkins (Plate [52], Figs. 2 and 3) are similar to those used by the Roro coast people and in Mekeo, except that the usual form, instead of being rather short and broad with a narrow opening, is longer and narrower, some of them being, say, 3 feet long, and often very curved and crooked in shape.
Their only eating utensils are wooden dishes and small pieces of wood, or sometimes of cassowary or kangaroo bone, which are used as forks, and pieces of split bamboo, which are used for cutting meat; but these latter are used for other purposes, and rather come within the list of ordinary implements, and will be there described. They also use prepared pig-bones as forks; but these again are largely used for other purposes, and will be described under the same heading.
The dishes (Plate [52], Fig. 1) are made out of the trunk of a tree called ongome. The usual length of a dish, without its handles, is between 1 and 2 feet; its width varies from 9 inches to 1 foot, and its depth from 3 to 6 inches. It is rudely carved out of the tree-trunk,[2] the work being done with stone adzes—unless they happen to possess European axes—and it generally has a handle at one or both ends. It is not decorated with carving in any way. The common form of handle is merely a simple knob about 3 inches long and 1½ inches wide. But it is sometimes less simple, and I have a dish one of the handles of which is divided into two projecting pieces about 7½ inches long and joined to each other at the end. The handle is always carved out of the same piece of wood as is the dish; never made separately and afterwards attached. The wooden forks are simply bits cut from trees and sharpened at one end, and they are without prongs. Their use is only temporary, and they are not permanently stored as household utensils. The cassowary and kangaroo bone implements (Plate [25], Fig. 3) are also merely roughly pointed unpronged pieces of bone, and otherwise without special form. When eating en famille they do not always use these pointed wooden and bone sticks, but very commonly take the food out of the dish with their hands only; but if the family had guests with them they would probably use the sticks more, and their hands less. The men and women often eat together, sitting round the dish and helping themselves out of it, though, if there are too many to do this conveniently, pieces will be handed out to some of them.
Various Implements.
Besides the cooking and eating implements above described and other things, such as weapons of war and of hunting and fishing, and implements for manufacture, agriculture and music, which will be dealt with under their own headings, there are a few miscellaneous things which may be conveniently described here.
Bamboo knives (Plate [51], Fig. 5). These are simple strips made out of a special mountain form of bamboo, and are generally 8 to 10 inches long and about 1 inch wide. One edge is left straight for its whole length, and the other is cut away near the end, very much as we cut away one side of a quill pen, so as to produce a sharp point. The side edge which is used for cutting is the one which is not cut away at the end; and when it gets blunt it is renewed by simply peeling off a length of fibre, thus producing a new edge, bevelled inwards towards the concave side of the implement, and making a hard and very sharp fresh cutting edge. The point can of course be sharpened at any time in the obvious way.
Pig-bone implements (Plate [51], Fig. 2). These are the implements which are often used as forks, but they have straight edges also with which they are used as scraping knives, and they are utilised for many other purposes. The implement, which is, I think, similar to what is commonly found in Mekeo and on the coast, is made out of the leg-bone of a pig, and is generally from 5 to 8 inches long. One side of the bone is ground away, so as to make the implement flattish in section, one side (the outside unground part of the bone) being somewhat convex, and the other (where the bone has been ground away) being rather concave. Some of the joint end of the bone is left to serve as a handle; and from this the bone is made to narrow down to a blunt, rather flattish and rounded point, somewhat like that of a pointed paper-cutter. The side edge is used for scraping, and the point for sticking into things.
Smoking pipes are in the ordinary well-known form of Mekeo and the coast, being made of sections of bamboo stem in which the natural intersecting node near the mouthpiece end is bored and the node at the other end is left closed, and between these two nodes, near to the closed one, is a flute-like hole, in which is placed the cigarette of tobacco wrapped up in a leaf. They are, however, generally not ornamented; or, if they are so, it is merely in a simple geometric pattern of straight lines. I obtained one pipe (Plate [51], Fig. 1) of an unusual type, being much smaller than is usual. A special feature of this pipe is its decoration, which includes groups of concentric circles. This is the only example of a curved line which I ever met with among the Mafulu villages, and it is probable that it had not been made there.
Boring drills (Plate [51], Fig. 4) are also similar to those of Mekeo and the coast, except that there the fly-wheel is, I think, usually a horizontal circular disc, through the centre of which the upright shaft of the implement passes, whereas in the Mafulu boring instrument the fly-wheel, through which the shaft passes, is a rudely cut flat horizontal piece of wood about 9 or 10 inches long, 2 inches broad, and half an inch or less thick, and also that in Mafulu the native point, made out of a pointed fragment of the stone used for making club-heads, adze blades and cloth-beaters, is not generally replaced by a European iron point, as is so commonly the case in Mekeo and near the coast. These drills are used for boring dogs’ teeth and shells and other similar hard-substanced things, but are useless for boring articles of wood or other soft substances, in which the roughly formed point would stick.[3]