Breadfruit

the most important food plant of the South Sea Islands. The fruit grows on a low tree at a height of ten or twenty feet from the ground, and hangs from the branches in clusters of three or four, looking something like rough, furry muskmelons. The fruit is ready for use just before it is ripe, but, as there are several varieties ripening at different seasons and each tree produces two or three crops a year, the native has little difficulty in finding suitable fruit for his dinner the year around. We can get an idea of bread-fruit and the origin of its name by considering that it is filled with a sort of dough. The native digs a pit, puts hot rocks in the bottom, some fresh leaves on the rocks, slices of breadfruit on the leaves, more leaves and stones on these, then more leaves and breadfruit if he likes,--finally covering his pit with earth for half an hour. His bread is then ready to eat hot from the oven. Sometimes stones are heated and a huge pit is made by the efforts of a whole village, and enough bread is baked to last a month or two. Sometimes the entire fruit is baked and is eaten from the shell. A. R. Wallace in his Malay Archipelago says: "With meat and gravy it is a vegetable superior to anything I know, either in temperate or tropical countries. With sugar, milk, butter, or treacle (molasses) it is a delicious pudding, having a very slight and delicate but characteristic flavor, which, like that of good bread and potatoes, one never tires of." The breadfruit may also be sliced and dried in the sun to be afterward ground into flour. See Banana