Quotation from: The Cruise of the Snark

Written by: Jack London


We watched a Raratongan woman, with swollen, distorted limbs,
prepare our cocoanut cream, and then went out to the cook-shed where
Tehei and Bihaura were cooking dinner. And then it was served to us
on a dry-goods box in the house. Our hosts waited until we were
done and then spread their table on the floor. But our table! We
were certainly in the high seat of abundance. First, there was
glorious raw fish, caught several hours before from the sea and
steeped the intervening time in lime-juice diluted with water. Then
came roast chicken. Two cocoanuts, sharply sweet, served for drink.
There were bananas that tasted like strawberries and that melted in
the mouth, and there was banana-poi that made one regret that his
Yankee forebears ever attempted puddings. Then there was boiled
yam, boiled taro, and roasted feis, which last are nothing more or
less than large mealy, juicy, red-coloured cooking bananas. We
marvelled at the abundance, and, even as we marvelled, a pig was
brought on, a whole pig, a sucking pig, swathed in green leaves and
roasted upon the hot stones of a native oven, the most honourable
and triumphant dish in the Polynesian cuisine. And after that came
coffee, black coffee, delicious coffee, native coffee grown on the
hillsides of Tahaa.

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