United States or Maldives ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In one pot bean-cake was being made, a long, complicated process; in another, cakes were frying in oil; in another, rice was boiling. One of my chair coolies seemed to be the chef par excellence; brandishing a big iron ladle, he went from pot to pot, stirring, tasting, seasoning, and generally lording it over two others working under his orders.

"It was there that I passed my military youth. Have you ever eaten Indian bean-cake?" "I have tasted it." "And that was enough, eh? But I have lived on it for eight weeks in an Iroquois village. Yes, eight weeks bean-cake was the most horrible of my experiences, except when I saw the hand of an unfortunate Potawatomie turn up in an Abenaki broth-pot. Do you remember General Montcalm?"

You could get a basin of fresh beans for ten cash, dried bean-cake for five, beans cooked and strained to a stiff batter for making soup for seven cash the ounce, while a large square of white bean-cake was sold for one copper cent. A saucer of spun rice or millet, looking much like vermicelli, with a seasoning of vinegar, cost five cash.

The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower picture shows miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at Changchun. That is wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved machinery or scientific knowledge.

Then she hung the quilts over poles to sun, dusted the screens, and placed an offering of rice on the steps of the tiny shrine to Inari, where the little foxes kept guard. These simple duties being accomplished, she tied a bit of bean-cake in her gaily colored handkerchief, and stepping into her geta, went pattering off to school.