Yams - Ugh!
Memories of Shipwreck in Santa Cruz.
[To the Editor ] It is with fear and trembling that I enter a discussion against one who is such an authority on the Pacific as Mr.
A. J. Vogan, but I cannot let his paean of praise for the yam as an article of kaikai fit for white stomachs (P.I.M., 20/12/32) pass without slight protest.
I, too, have had more than a nodding acquaintance with a yam diet, and the memory of it will last to my death-bed.
In 1923, while going about our lawful occasions in the Santa Cruz Group, our schooner brought up one dark, dirty night on the outer reef of Utupua and very rapidly began to come unstuck; so we grabbed what food we could and got ashore in the copra boats.
In those days, Santa Cruz was prac tically uninhabited, except for a timber camp on Vanikoro, and the timber-men were nearly out of tucker themselves — we had had supplies for them in our schooner.
In Utupua there is plenty of kaikai — of a kind. We got fish, bush pig and yams, and they were welcome after the tinned, salted, dried and otherwise pre served schooner grub; but after a week, during which yam figured on the menu three times a day, we were getting sick of the sight of it. After a fortnight, we would willingly have swapped half a ton of yams for a porterhouse steak and a mug of Pilsener. When we had been on Utupua a month we would have bartered the whole yam crop of the island for a fathom of “hot-dogs.”
I am indebted to Mr. Vogan for the information that the yam is a mono cotyledon. What we called it, before we were picked up by a casual recruiter, could only be printed on asbestos.
But, as Mr. Vogan points out, there are “yams” and yams, and we certainly must have encountered the quoted vari ety. Even our Chinese cook, who was an expert at disguising “tinned dog” and all the other monotonous viands so well-known to the “man belong schooner,” could do nothing to put some taste into Utupua yam. We had them boiled, fried, roasted and baked in the ashes and camp oven; and each new style of cooking left this abomination of foodstuffs as tasteless and (I say it em phatically) unnutritious as the last.
If Mr. Vogan had spent as much energy in writing of the virtues of taro, I could agree with him. It comes nearer to what no Islands vegetable can ever hope to equal—the humble spud.
I wish Mr. Vogan every success in his attempt to acclimatise yams at Mr. Jou bert’s farm on the Tweed and hope, for the sake of their consumers, that he gets more flavour into them than do the dusky gardeners of Utupua.
I am, etc.,