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 leave 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-trunk, 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
cakes, 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 well, and can be baked as wanted, so that we may
estimate that in ten days a man may produce food for the whole year. This is on
the supposition that he possesses sago trees of his own, for they are now all
private property. If he does not, he has to pay about seven and sixpence for one;
and as labour here is five pence a day, the total cost of a year's food for one man
is about twelve shillings. The effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly
prejudicial, for the inhabitants of the sago countries are never so well off as
those where rice is cultivated. Many of the people here have neither vegetables
nor fruit, but live almost entirely on sago and a little fish. Having few