JANG TANG. BHOT. Uncultivated pasture lands ; the uplands of Tibet.
The Janipha manihot plant grows about six or eight feet high, with a tuberous root weighing up to thirty pounds. The acrid milky juice, when fresh, is poisonous, but the roots are washed, scraped, ground, or grated into a pulp, and the juice pressed out and preserved. The pulp or meal that remains is called Couaque, and is made into cassava cakes or cassava bread. The expressed juice by standing deposits a white powder, which, when washed and dried, forms what the British call tapioca meal or Brazilian arrow - root, by the French Moussache, and in Guiana, Cypipa, and when this is dried on hot plates, the grains of fccula burst and adhere to gether and form tapioca. The expressed juice is sometimes fermented with treacle into an intoxi cating fluid.
Cassareep, the concentrated juice of the bitter cassava, forms tho basis of the West India dish pepper-pot. One of the remarkable properties of cassareep is that meat placed in it is preserved longer than by any process of cooking. Sweet
cassava is prepared from the Manihot aipi, which is similar to J. manihot, but has no deleterious properties.
From the facility with which the bitter cassava can be rasped into flour, it is cultivated almost to the exclusion of the sweet variety, which con tains in its centre a tough, fibrous, ligneous cord. The bitter variety, however, contains a highly acrid and poisonous juice, which is got rid of by heat or by fermentation, so that cassava bread is quite free from it.
The poorer classes of British India use the tapioca flour, but none is exported. The plant thrives in any soil, although a sandy loam is the best. It requires no cultivation whatever, and is occasionally met with in Arakan, growing wild in the jungle. At the Madras Exhibition of 1855, excellent tapioca was exhibited by Mr. Rundall, of Razole, near Rajamundry.
Pearl tapioca is not from this plant, but from potato starch.—Tomlinson ; T. Agri.-Bort. Socy. xii. p. 175 ; Hogg; Birdtvood.