Cooking bananas are much used, and grow wild on the lands of the natives, who sell them for a trifle. Every house has its own patch of eating bananas of many kinds, and orange-trees are almost sure to be there as well. There is always a huge bunch of bananas, and two or three great palm-leaf baskets of oranges, on the verandah of every house, and the inmates consume them both in uncounted numbers all day. Pineapples are easily raised in the little bit of garden, or they can be bought for a penny a piece. A vanilla vine will probably spread its beautiful thick leaves over the fence, and hang out, in due season, a store of pods for flavouring use in the kitchens. Arrowroot may be grown or bought--a big basket sells for sixpence, and it has no more to do with the arrowroot of the grocer’s shop at home, than a real seal mantle worth three figures has to do with a two guinea “electric”. Limes grow wild everywhere, and the island housewife makes full use of them. They clean her floors, her tables, her enamelled ware, stained table linen, or marked clothing; they wash her hair delightfully, and take the sunburn off her face and hands; they make the best of “long drinks,” and the daintiest of cake flavouring, they are squeezed into every fruit salad, and over every stew; they take the place of vinegar, if the island stores run low; in truth, they are used for almost every purpose of domestic cooking, cleaning, or chemistry.
Cabbage of an excellent kind grows wild in a few islands. Tomatoes, small but excellent in flavour, are found on the borders of the seashore, in many. Nearly all English vegetables are grown by the white settlers with extremely little trouble. The egg-plant, known in England as a greenhouse ornament, here thrives splendidly in gardens, and instead of the little plum-like fruit of the British plant, produces a great purple globe as big as a fine marrow, which resembles fried eggs very closely, if sliced and cooked in a pan. But in truth there is no limit to the richness and generosity of the island soil. Were it not for the troublesome item of butcher’s meat, housekeeping in the Pacific would be marvellously cheap and easy. That, however, is the housekeeper’s bugbear. Outside of Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Honolulu, fresh beef is not be had at all, and fresh mutton not often. In very many islands tinned meat and fowls are the only resource; and the lady of the house must tax her ingenuity to the utmost to find ways of disguising the inevitable “tin.” Curry, stew, pie, mince; mince, pie, stew, curry--so runs the monotonous programme in most houses; and disguise it as one may, the trail of the tin is over it all.