MYALL’S BAKING

When blacks are introduced to the ways of white men, singular, often grotesque episodes occur.  A big, shy, clumsy fellow endeavouring to put on a shirt as a pair of “combinations” does cut an absurd figure, and the first efforts of many meddling and unskilled cooks to make a “damper” are often pathetic failures.  Not long since a beche-de-mer fisherman engaged a crew from the tablelands at the back of Princess Charlotte Bay.  Never having been on board a schooner before, and being absolutely innocent of the ways of the whites, they found “damper” unpalatable, and flour was given them that they might prepare it after their own methods.  Some nuts ("koie-ie,” CRYPTOCARIA PALMERSTONI, for example) blacks toast until the shell (impregnated with resin) starts into a blaze and the kernel falls out.  The kernels are then chewed and ejected until sufficient dough is available for a cake, which is flattened out between green leaves and toasted.  The dough “rises” as though leavened with yeast, but this lightness is considered a fault, for the dough is taken out, squeezed between hands moistened with spittle until it becomes sodden.  Then it is bound again tightly in green leaves in long rolls, and buried in the hot ashes till cooked.  Such cakes are said to be very nice.  They must be nutritious for the blacks among whom Koi-ie is one of the principal foods are fat and agile fellows.  These Princess Charlotte Bay boys cooked their flour in a somewhat similar way.  The result was a sodden, tough, dirty damper, the sight of which roused the not usually tender susceptibilities of the owner of the boat.  Taking pity on the untutored boys, he had a proper damper made with soda and acid and a due proportion of salt.  It turned out a beauty, so spongy and light that it almost lifted the lid off the camp oven, in which it was baked.  The boys accepted it, but not without manifestations of doubt and suspicion.  They presently returned in a solid and unanimous deputation loudly proclaiming that the boss was a humbug, and had cheated them, the bread being full of holes containing no “ki-ki” whatever, while they made “ki-ki” as dense as the deck, which they tapped with their feet significantly and about which there was no palpably hollow fraud.  At first the boss failed to understand, for the blacks had little even of pidgin English.  When he did realise the true state of the case he wasted no breath in explanations.  The blacks catered for themselves in the future, and got fat and saucy on the diet of plain flour and water, so cooked that sometimes it was like half-burnt deal, and as often a sticky, ropy mess.

EVERYTHING FOR A NAME