One dish, called “ke-le’-ke,” consists of camotes, pared and sliced, and cooked and eaten with rice.  This is a ceremonial dish, and is always prepared at the lis-lis ceremony and at a-su-fal’-i-wis or sugar-making time.

Camotes are always prepared immediately before being cooked, as they blacken very quickly after paring.

Millet is stored in the harvest bunches, and must be threshed before it is eaten.  After being threshed in the wooden mortar the winnowed seeds are again returned to the mortar and crushed.  This crushed grain is cooked as is rice and without salt.  It is eaten also with the hands —­ “fingers” is too delicate a term.

Some other vegetable foods are also cooked and eaten by the Igorot.  Among them is taro which, however, is seldom grown in the Bontoc area.  Outside the area, both north and south, there are large sementeras of it cultivated for food.  Several wild plants are also gathered, and the leaves cooked and eaten as the American eats “greens.”

The Bontoc Igorot also has preferences among his regular flesh foods.  The chicken is prized most; next he favors pork; third, fish; fourth, carabao; and fifth, dog.  Chicken, pork (except wild hog), and dog are never eaten except ceremonially.  Fish and carabao are eaten on ceremonial occasions, but are also eaten at other times —­ merely as food.

The interesting ceremonial killing, dressing, and eating of chickens is presented elsewhere, in the sections on “Death” and “Ceremonials.”  It is unnecessary to repeat the information here, as the processes are everywhere the same, excepting that generally no part of the fowl, except the feathers, is unconsumed —­ head, feet, intestines, everything, is devoured.

The hog is ceremonially killed by cutting its throat, not by “sticking,” as is the American custom, but the neck is cut, half severing the head.  At Ambuklao, on the Agno River in Benguet Province, I saw a hog ceremonially killed by having a round-pointed stick an inch in diameter pushed and twisted into it from the right side behind the foreleg, through and between the ribs, and into the heart.  The animal bled internally, and, while it was being cut up by four men with much ceremony and show, the blood was scooped from the rib basin where it had gathered, and was mixed with the animal’s brains.  The intestines were then emptied by drawing between thumb and fingers, and the blood and brain mixture poured into them from the stomach as a funnel.  A string of blood-and-brain sausages resulted, when the intestines were cooked.  The mouth of the Bontoc hog is held or tied shut until the animal is dead.  The Benguet hog could be heard for fifteen minutes at least a quarter of a mile.

After the Bontoc hog is killed it is singed, cut up, and all put in the large shallow iron boiler.  When cooked it is cut into smaller pieces, which are passed around to those assembled at the ceremonial.