eaten. The preparation occupies no appreciable time. The winter before last I saw one or two hundred Italian workmen repairing the retaining wall to a river, and had reason to admire both their industry and their simple, frugal habits. As the mid-day hour approached, one of a gang of ten or twelve men would step aside and prepare the dinner. It nearly always consisted of polenta, or Indian-corn meal boiled in water. It took the best part of an hour to prepare it, and there was also the trouble of kettles, fires, providing wood, besides many antecedent preparations, even when cooking was thus reduced to its simplest proportions. The Canarian laborer has no such trouble. The roasting of the grain is more quickly done than cooking polenta, and can be prepared in larger quantity by the wife at home.
The grinding is the same in both cases, but gofio has the great advantage of being easily carried about the person in a bag, and is always ready to be eaten. It is also much more palatable. The Canarian Archipelago consists of seven inhabited islands with a population of two hundred and forty thousand persons. From the best information I could get, I should think that fully two hundred thousand of them live almost exclusively on gofio, as their fathers have done before them, including their Guanche predecessors, from time immemorial. I have been thus particular in giving, in some detail, the origin, preparation, and importance of gofio in sustaining a large population, because I believe this article to be worthy of attention on the part of purveyers of farinaceous foods. If introduced into the United States, it would add a delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious article of food, very convenient to use, to our already large variety. But gofio has other claims to our attention and favor than its economy, convenience, and evident highly nutritive qualities.
Finding it used, not only by the common people, for whom it constitutes the chief article of sustenance as already stated, but also in the homes of the wealthier citizens, children being especially fond of and thriving well on it, I tried specimens of both wheat and maize gofio and found them very palatable—the maize especially so, having a delicious, aromatic flavor which soon made me prefer it to bread, especially in the morning. Very soon gofio, with a soft-boiled egg, goat's milk, and coffee, constituted a satisfactory breakfast. In fact, I liked it so well, and found it so digestible and nutritious, that I kept to it and throve on it till, at the end of two months, it occurred to me that during that time there had been no instance of "acid stomach" to which, in the best of times, I had always been subject. I left Teneriffe soon after, and during the voyage, and for some time after landing in the West Indies, the gofio-breakfast was suspended. After some weeks without it, the acidity returned very severely, owing to exposure and fatigue. And, as usual, acidity once established, persistently continued. After suffering several days I thought of the gofio, a small quantity of which we had brought from Teneriffe. On
