The Naturalist in Nicaragua by Thomas Belt
page 90 of 444 (20%)
page 90 of 444 (20%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
grow maize, but made bread from the roots of the mandioca (Manihot
aipim); and still in British Guiana, on the Lower Amazon, and in north-eastern Brazil, farina made from the roots of the mandioca is the staple food. Maize has been introduced by the Portuguese, but it has no native name, and is used mostly for feeding cattle and fowls, scarcely at all for the food of the people. This fundamental difference in the food of the indigenes points to a great distinction between the peoples to which I shall have in the sequel to revert. In the West India Islands, Cuba and Hayti seem to have been peopled from Yucatan, and Florida, Porto Rico, and all the islands to the southwards, from Venezuela. In Central America, the bread made from the maize is prepared at the present day exactly as it was in ancient Mexico. The grain is first of all boiled along with wood ashes or a little lime; the alkali loosens the outer skin of the grain, and this is rubbed off with the hands in running water, a little of it at a time, placed upon a slightly concave stone, called a metlate, from the Aztec metlatl, on which it is rubbed with another stone shaped like a rolling-pin. A little water is thrown on it as it is bruised, and it is thus formed into paste. A ball of the paste is taken and flattened out between the hands into a cake about ten inches diameter and three-sixteenths of an inch thick, which is baked on a slightly concave earthenware pan. The cakes so made are called tortillas, and are very nutritious. When travelling, I preferred them myself to bread made from wheaten flour. When well made and eaten warm, they are very palatable. There are a few small sugar plantations near Pital. The juice is pressed out of the canes by rude wooden rollers set upright in |
|