Nasi

“ Alezia began to tremble in every limb, as if she had an attack of fever, and she resumed her seat, pale and thoughtful. She was still in doubt.
"You were very cruel to her, cousin," I whispered to Checchina. "You took delight in inflicting pain on a pure heart, in order to avenge your foolish self-esteem. Ought you not to thank your rival, since she refused Nasi?"
Kind-hearted Checca went to her, took her hands familiarly, and sat on a hassock at her feet.
"My sweet angel," she said, "do not be suspicious of us; you know nothing of the honorable and attractive freedom of Bohemian life. ”

“ He shall be then not only the Nasi the chosen Prince from among the people ; not only the Moshel, God s Viceroy or Deputy Ruler on the earth ; not only a constitutional King, who reigns but does not rule but He shall be the Noges, the absolute Ruler, or " Exactor " the most absolute and autocratic King the world has yet seen. ”

“ There were six round dishes of heaped-up rice, boiled in butter; six dishes of boiled wheat, mixed with minced meat and spices; a few plates of fowls and lamb, and bowls of lebbeny or sour cream, and a good supply of sweet cream, cheese, olives, and salad. A cake of bread was placed before each person. As soon as Salihh Agha was seated, he began eating silently and—as it seemed to me—voraciously, quite in Bedouin style, making pellets of the hot rice or wheat in the palm of his hand, and with a skillful jerk tossing them into his mouth. ”

“ The Siamese are so accustomed to these highly flavoured dishes that they would look upon a meal of turkey and plum-pudding as utterly tasteless and insipid. One of the sauces in common use contains chillies, stale prawns, black pepper, garlic, onions, citron-juice, ginger, and brine!
When the members of the family sit down to take a meal, they squat on the floor. A big bowl of rice is placed in the centre of the ring, and round it are arranged smaller basins of curry. Everybody helps himself, so that the fastest eater gets the biggest share. ”

“ A ladle-full is handed out to each man, who receives it on his leaf. The rice is served out by the hands of the attendants. The guests manipulate a huge ball of rice and curry mixed between the fingers of the right hand, pass this solemnly into their widely-gaping mouths, with the head thrown back to receive the mess, like an adjutant-bird swallowing a frog, and then they masticate with much apparent enjoyment. Sugar, treacle, curds, milk, oil, butter, preserves, and chutnees are served out to the more wealthy and respectable. ”

“ The pisang is the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist. ”

“ With long wands in their hands, they dance, singing wild incantations. They have already prepared the food for the feast—chickens [75] roasted in their feathers; cakes of rice, spun like vermicelli and fried in cocoa-nut oil; curries, and salads of bitter and acid leaves; sticks of small bamboo filled with pulut rice and boiled, when it turns to a jelly and is agreeably flavoured with the young bamboo. It is the women also who serve out the tuak, a spirit prepared from rice and spiced with various ingredients, tobacco being one. The men must drink at these feasts ”

“ Whether an Oni has a nose, or a snout, is not agreed upon by the learned men who have studied them.
No one ever heard of an Oni being higher than a yardstick, but they are so strong that one of them can easily lift two bushel bags of rice at once. In Japan, they steal the food offered to the idols. They can live without air. They like nothing better than to drink both the rice spirit called saké, and the black liquid called soy, of which only a few drops, as a sauce on fish, are enough for a man. Of this sauce, the Dutch, as well as the Japanese, are very fond. ”

“ Soy is used to the fish. The rice is brought in hot in a [ pg 321 ] wooden vessel with a lid, and is distributed in abundance, but the other dishes in extremely small portions. After meals, especially in the evening, the Japanese often drink warm saki, or rice-brandy, out of peculiar porcelain bottles and small cups set apart for that purpose alone.
During the meal one is commonly surrounded by a numerous personnel of female attendants, squatted down on the floor, who keep up with the guest, if he understands their language, a lively conversation, interrupted by salvoes of hearty laughter. ”

“ Believing the rice to be animated by a soul like that of a man, the Indonesians naturally treat it with the deference and the consideration which they show to their fellows. Thus they behave towards the rice in bloom as they behave towards a pregnant woman; they abstain from firing guns or making loud noises in the field, lest they should so frighten the soul of the rice that it would miscarry and bear no grain ”

“ The Minangkabauers definitely attribute a soul to rice, and will sometimes assert that rice pounded in the usual way tastes better than rice ground in a mill, because in the mill the body of the rice was so bruised and battered that the soul has fled from it. Like the Javanese they think that the rice is under the special guardianship of a female spirit called Saning Sari, who is conceived as so closely knit up with the plant that the rice often goes by her name, as with the Romans the corn might be called Ceres. ”

“ Everybody knows that rice is a daily food stuff not only of the Japanese, but of the Chinese and many other Asiatic peoples. In the case of the inhabitants of northern China, however, other kinds of cereals are eaten as well as rice, as a natural consequence of the scanty production of the latter in those regions. And it is worthy of notice that even in southern China this cereal is eaten not as is customary in our country. There they eat rice as well as meat, or rather more meat than rice, while here in Japan meat and fish are mere ancillary foods, rice being the chief article of diet. ”

“ The Oni put her in a boat and rowed away across a river to his castle. There she cooked for him such dishes as he had never before tasted, and they were good.
But when she came to make rice dumplings, the Oni said to her, “You are a good cook, but you are wasteful. When you cook rice put but one grain into the pot.”
“One grain!” she cried. “Tee-hee-hee! how could any one live on one grain of rice?”
“I will show you,” said the Oni. “For though you are a woman and think you know much, there are some things which I know better than you.”
Sanja was silent ”

“ Among the covered lacquer dishes on the little table set Page 81 before each kneeling breakfaster, luncher or diner in Japan there is one which is empty. This is the rice bowl. When the meal begins—or in the case of an elaborate dinner at the rice course—the maid brings in a large covered wooden copper-bound or brass-bound tub or round lacquered box of hot rice. This rice she serves with a big wooden spoon, the only spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal. A man may have three helpings or four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup. ”

“ Although, for economy's sake, a considerable amount of barley is eaten with or instead of rice, it may be said in a general way that the Japanese people, like so many millions of other Asiatics, have rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If they have anything to eat between meals it is as like as not to be rice cakes—- to the foreigner's taste a loathly, half-cooked compost of rice flour or pounded rice and water, a sort of tepid underdone muffin. ”

“ In a third are boiled buckwheat cakes or dumplings, and tofu or bean-curd. In the porcelain cup is rice. In an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a broiled fish in soy. Lifting off the covers and adjusting my chopsticks deftly, I begin. The bowl of rice is first attacked, and quickly finished. The attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter, and uncovering the steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful. It is etiquette to dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a deadly breach of good manners to ask to have the other two bowls replenished. ”

“ In the plains he subsists mainly on rice boiled in water, precisely as do the workpeople in the towns, a little fish seasoned with soy, or Japanese sauce, flavours this very simple menu, which also includes a few eggs, and occasionally a chicken, a little game, or a wild duck. In the mountains, where the people are very poor, and rice is considered a luxury, barley and millet are sometimes substituted. The fisher-folk replace this almost exclusively vegetarian diet by the produce of their work. Even among well-off people in the towns the principal dish at dinner consists of boiled rice. ”

“ Have ready half a pint of rice, that has been boiled in a quart of water, till soft and dry. Mix the rhubarb and the rice well together; beating them hard. Then mould it in cups slightly buttered, and set them on ice, or in a very cold place. Just before dinner, turn them out on a large dish. Serve up with them, in a bowl, cream and sugar, into which a nutmeg has been grated; or else a sauce made of equal portions of fresh butter and powdered white sugar, beaten together till very light, and flavoured with powdered cinnamon, or nutmeg, and oil of lemon or lemon-juice. ”

“ The hungry customer is handed a bowl half full of rice, on which is placed small portions of the various vegetables and a piece of meat, or some scraps of entrails, over all is poured a ladle full of the boiling congee, and the repast is ready. With his chopsticks the customer, holding the bowl to his wide open mouth, shovels in nearly as much rice as it will hold, then picking from the bowl pieces of the luscious morsels with which it is garnished, he lays them on the yet untouched rice, when he closes his mouth and proceeds with the process of mastication and deglutition. ”

“ Drain the rice thoroughly and put it back into the saucepan for a few minutes to dry by the side of the stove; then season it with salt, freshly-ground black pepper, a dust of curry powder, and a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan cheese, and spread it out on a flat dish. When cold, take about a heaped dessertspoonful of the rice at a time and form it into four or five little round cakes, capable of taking a poached egg; brush the rice cakes over with egg, then cover them with fine, dried breadcrumbs, and fry them in a bath of boiling fat until they are a deep gold in colour. ”

“ One of these days, when a certain necessary thing shall have been pleasantly accomplished, I shall use the bowl myself, to eat therefrom my evening rice. There is no porcelain in the world," he went on rather academically, "like ancient Ming marked on the reverse side with the honorific seal of peace, longevity, and harmonious prosperity. It rings sweetly—like a lute made of glass—under the chop-sticks' delicate touch."
"Ho!" whispered Nag En Hin, the American-born son of Nag Hop Fat, the Pell Street soothsayer, who had recently graduated from high school. ”

“ Richardson and I became so fond of rice before we had lived long on that staple that we thought we could never again eat a meal without it. The Japanese understand how to prepare it and cook it in such a way that each grain is dry and separate from the others. The average dish of rice in America tastes and looks like a mass of Library paste.
Life in a Japanese hotel is a continual round of novelties and interesting experiences to the uninitiated Western traveller. ”

“ A quart of rice, which when cooked is of great bulk, is a laborer’s meal, but besides there are other dishes, which render its insipidity palatable. Among them are pounded capsicum, soy, various native sauces of abominable odors, kimshi, a species of sour kraut, seaweed, salt fish, and salted seaweed fried in batter. The very poor only take two meals a day, but those who can afford it take three and four. ”

“ The unhappy foreigner tastes one dish after the other, finds each one worse than the last, and concludes to wait till the next course. This is composed of a very great dainty, raw, live fish, which one dips in sauce before devouring. Then comes rice, and the chopsticks of the Japanese feasters go to work in marvellous fashion. With their strips of wood or ivory they whip the rice grain into their mouths with wonderful speed and dexterity, but our unlucky foreigner gets one grain into his mouth in five minutes, and is reduced to beg for a spoon. ”

“ Ben-to!" It reminded Daunt that he had had no luncheon, and he bought one. He had long ago accustomed himself to Japanese food [pg 247] and liked it, but to-day the two shallow sections inspired no appetite. The half which held the rice he viciously threw out of the window and unrolling the fresh-cut chop-sticks from their paper square, rummaged discontentedly among the contents of the other: dried cuttlefish, bean-curd, slices of boiled lily-bulb, cinnamon-sticks, lotos stems and a coil of edible seaweed, all wrapped in green leaves. In the end, the mélange followed the rice. ”

“ When you arrived, your host spread out fine mats and rugs, of Tibetan and ancient Chinese manufacture, and often of great value. In front of a raised seat were displayed in shiny brass bowls the various viands and delicacies which constituted the meal. There was rice always; there was curried mutton, milk and curd with sugar; then chapatis made in Hindustani fashion and Shale, a kind of sweet pancake made of flour, ghi (butter) , sugar or honey, also Parsad, a thick paste of honey, burnt sugar, butter and flour, all well cooked together—a dainty morsel even for a jaded palate. ”