In addition to
fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in
the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very
rarely knows how to cook them.
Then, too, you can get more fruit
and vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down:
the plantain, {28} not least among them and very good when allowed
to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly
fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same
manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and
baked. Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never
forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one
of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju. They meant
well. But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories
and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla,
aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.
The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in
an oven, or fried. When cooked in either way I am devoted to them,
but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them,
for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next.
It is this way:
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Words from 11540 to 11803
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