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- 5328
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:25.200Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5271
- text
- The leaves of the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut
and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady’s lace collar. As they
annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety
of their gradually changing hues the fleeting shades of the expiring
dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they
are, sink into nothing in comparison with this tree.
The leaf, in one particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours
are blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into
a superb and striking head-dress. The principal fibre traversing its
length being split open a convenient distance, and the elastic sides of
the aperture pressed apart, the head is inserted between them, the leaf
drooping on one side, with its forward half turned jauntily up on the
brows, and the remaining part spreading laterally behind the ears.
The fruit somewhat resembles in magnitude and general appearance one of
our citron melons of ordinary size; but, unlike the citron, it has no
sectional lines drawn along the outside. Its surface is dotted all over
with little conical prominences, looking not unlike the knobs, on an
antiquated church door. The rind is perhaps an eighth of an inch in
thickness; and denuded of this at the time when it is in the greatest
perfection, the fruit presents a beautiful globe of white pulp, the
whole of which may be eaten, with the exception of a slender core, which
is easily removed.
The bread-fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit
to be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.
The most simple manner in which this operation is performed, and I
think, the best, consists in placing any number of the freshly plucked
fruit, when in a particular state of greenness, among the embers of a
fire, in the same way that you would roast a potato. After the lapse
of ten or fifteen minutes, the green rind embrowns and cracks, showing
through the fissures in its sides the milk-white interior. As soon as it
cools the rind drops off, and you then have the soft round pulp in its
purest and most delicious state. Thus eaten, it has a mild and pleasing
flavour.
Sometimes after having been roasted in the fire, the natives snatch it
briskly from the embers, and permitting it to slip out of the yielding
rind into a vessel of cold water, stir up the mixture, which they
call ‘bo-a-sho’. I never could endure this compound, and indeed the
preparation is not greatly in vogue among the more polite Typees.
There is one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served,
that renders it a dish fit for a king. As soon as it is taken from the
fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part
is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with
a pestle of the same substance. While one person is performing this
operation, another takes a ripe cocoanut, and breaking it in halves,
which they also do very cleverly, proceeds to grate the juicy meat into
fine particles. This is done by means of a piece of mother-of-pearl
shell, lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its
straight side accurately notched like a saw. The stick is sometimes a
grotesquely-formed limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting
from its body like so many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or
three feet from the ground.
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