Rice is the staple food, and most families have sufficient for subsistence during the year.  When rice is needed for food bunches of the palay, as tied up at the harvest, are brought and laid in the small pocket of the wooden mortar where they are threshed out of the fruit head.  One or two mortarsful is thus threshed and put aside on a winnowing tray.  When sufficient has been obtained the grain is put again in the mortar and pounded to remove the pellicle.  Usually only sufficient rice is threshed and cleaned for the consumption of one or two days.  When the pellicle has been pounded loose the grain is winnowed on a large round tray by a series of dexterous movements, removing all chaff and dirt with scarcely the loss of a kernel of good rice.

The work of threshing, hulling, and winnowing usually falls to the women and girls, but is sometimes performed by the men when their women are preoccupied.  At one time when an American wished two or three bushels of palay threshed, as horse food for the trail, three Bontoc men performed the work in the classic treadmill manner.  They spread a mat on the earth, covered it with palay, and then tread, or rather “rubbed,” out the kernels with their bare feet.  They often scraped up the mass with their feet, bunching it and rubbing it in a way that strongly suggested hands.

Rice is cooked in water without salt.  An earthern pot is half filled with the grain and is then filled to the brim with cold water.  In about twenty minutes the rice is cooked, filling the vessel, and the water is all absorbed or evaporated.  If there is no great haste, the rice sets ten or fifteen minutes longer while the kernels dry out somewhat.  As the Igorot cooks rice, or, for that matter, as the native anywhere in the Islands cooks it, the grains are not mashed and mussed together, but each kernel remains whole and separate from the others.

Cooked rice, ma-kan’, is almost always eaten with the fingers, being crowded into the mouth with the back of the thumb.  In Bontoc, Samoki, Titipan, Mayinit, and Ganang salt is either sprinkled on the rice after it is dished out or is tasted from the finger tips during the eating.  In some pueblos, as at Tulubin, almost no salt is eaten at any time.  When rice alone is eaten at a meal a family of five adults eats about ten Bontoc manojo of rice per day.

Beans are cooked in the form of a thick soup, but without salt.  Beans and rice, each cooked separately, are frequently eaten together; such a dish is called “sib-fan’.”  Salt is eaten with sib-fan’ by those pueblos which commonly consume salt.

Maize is husked, silked, and then cooked on the cob.  It is eaten from the cob, and no salt is used either in the cooking or eating.

Camotes are eaten raw a great deal about the pueblo, the sementera, and the trail.  Before they are cooked they are pared and generally cut in pieces about 2 inches long; they are boiled without salt.  They are eaten alone at many meals, but are relished best when eaten with rice.  They are always eaten from the fingers.