The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing.

  • Herbert Standing
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    eat his rice hard in the same way ; but this is by no means the case, for no one knows better than a Malagasy woman how to boil rice to perfection—just how much water to put into the earthen cooking-pot, and exactly how long to boil it, so that it shall be neither too hard on the one hand, nor too soft and pulpy on the other; certainly with all the practice they have they ought to be clever at cooking rice. Another curious practice followed by some mothers is that of giving a young child ox-hump to eat. Ox-hump consists of a tough kind of fat, and the reason why some give it to little children is, they say, ' to make their chests moist;' if it has any such beneficial effect, one would think it would be at the expense of putting their little stomachs out of order. In the Betsileo province it is customary when a mother is going to feed her baby to make it cry first; I suppose to ' get up' its appetite. This plan, however, is not followed until the baby is five or six months old. Now, perhaps, you know that rice, although very wholesome, is not one of the most nourishing kinds of food ; to live entirely, or even chiefly on rice, it is necessary to eat large quantities of it, and I am sure you would open your eyes in astonishment to see the amount of rice a Malagasy will put out of sight at each meal. One result of this is that the little children become rather an ugly shape, their little stomachs projecting in anything but a graceful manner. Sometimes a mother, in order to put some check on her child's appetite, will before a meal tie a piece of string loosely round its waist, and when this string gets tight the child is vbky, a very expressive, though somewhat inelegant word, which we can best translate by ' full' Since rice forms such an important article of diet in Malagasy homes, you will be interested in hearing a little about its cultivation. There are several kinds of rice grown in Madagascar ; those most largely cultivated are planted on level land, generally on great plains, which were formerly swamps, or on narrow terraces, rising tier above tier in the little sloping hollows along the sides of the hills. The