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The Naturalist in Nicaragua by Thomas Belt
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
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