BREADFRUIT.
It is almost too much to believe — the story of bread that grows on trees! But people who travel in tropical countries have seen and eaten this won derful fruit, and they tell us that the story is not a fable, but a simple, everyday fact. The natives go out and pick loaves of bread and bake them whole among the hot embers of outdoor or indoor fires. Then they open the crust and find the crumb part a rich, starchy mass that tastes to foreigners like mashed potato made rich by the addition of plenty of cream.
The breadfruit tree now grows in southern Florida, and bears its fruit there. So it is not unlikely that we can all see the plant and taste the loaves that hang like melons, as large as one's head, from the axils of the huge, glossy leaves. They are like the big, green oranges that hang on the osage orange trees, and like the mulberries, which are made of a great number of tiny fruits, all grown together. These three fruits I mention for the reason that the plants that bear them are all near relatives in a big botanical family.
The breadfruit tree grows to be thirty or forty feet high in its home in the South Sea Islands. Its blossoms, like those of many other plants, are borne separately, the fertile ones clustered in globular heads, the sterile ones in club-shaped catkins. When the fruit ripens its surface is rough still, for the huge mass is covered with the aggregate tips of all the fertile flowers.
The cultivated breadfruits have become, like the bananas, practically seedless. The soft pulp is fibrous only at the centre. So its food value has been increased, at the expense of the seed making function of the plant.
One of the romantic chapters of horticulture is the adventure of Lieutenant Bligh, who was commissioned by the British Government to go to Tahiti and get young plants of the breadfruit tree and take them to planters on the West Indian Islands, in hopes that this valuable species could become established.
The good ship Bounty got the cargo of plants loaded, and sailed away, but the lieutenant was seized in mid-ocean by his mutinous crew, who put him into a small boat and set him adrift, with a sailor or two, who remained faithful, for his company. Back the Bounty sailed and reached the port from which it put to sea, and the crew made a settlement on Pitcairn's Island. But the plucky Lieutenant Bligh lived to reach Eng land, and to head another expedition, which succeeded in carrying the breadfruit tree into the British West Indies, where it succeeded, and to-day is one of the most valuable of tropical fruits grown there.
It is one of the trees that grow best from cut tings made from new shoots. Unfortunately the fruit does not stand shipping as well as the cuttings and young trees, by which the species has been distributed very generally in the tropics of all countries.
Some trees feed and house and clothe people. Certain palm trees have this threefold value to the human race. The breadfruit tree is another. The inner fibre of the bark of young trees is made into cloth used for garments. The wood of the trunk is used in canoe and house building. Seams of boats are closed with a glue made of the sticky, milky juice that exudes from wounds in the bark.
The fruit is often piled into pits, where it be comes a soft, ill-smelling mass. But it still is a nutritious food when baked. The better way to preserve the fruit for future use is to dry thin slices. These slices may be baked as they are, and eaten, or first ground into meal and made into puddings and other dishes.