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The kitchen

The cooking house, unobtrusively situated among the vegetation at the back of the dwelling houses, was strictly utilitarian in purpose. It was used only during the time devoted to cooking, usually once a day, sometimes twice. The food was prepared, consigned to the heated stone oven, covered, and left until cooked. The cooks employed their waiting time elsewhere. When cooked, the food was placed in baskets and conveyed to the other houses. Eating did not take place in the cooking house.

The Samoan kitchen therefore contained the barest essentials; the oven site within, with its quota of loose stones and leaf covers, and the firewood without, were the essentials of equipment. A coconut grater, a few wooden bowls, and implements such as tongs, scrapers, and peelers lay on the floor. The floor was bare of mats and the walls were unscreened. Occasionally a fata shelf of poles was made to receive the baskets of uncooked food No reserve stock for more than two days at most was carried as the necessity for storing material ahead did not exist. Cooked food left over for another meal was usually hung up in baskets in the dwelling house where also hung the rat protectors already described.

In serving food, coconut leaf baskets, platters, leaves, and sometimes half coconut shells were all that was required. The food platters rested on the shelves in the guest or dwelling house. Baskets were quickly made from day to day. Leaves were selected from those used in the oven. Half coconut shells were picked up from the discards of grating. Water vessels were kept in the dwelling houses. Water was not used in cooking with the earth oven and little in the preparation of food. Fish were cooked with scales and entrails intact. Fowls were plucked, drawn, and singed. Every part of the pig, including blood and entrails, was used except the hair which was singed off. Before foreign governments laid on water supplies, water carried in coconut shells entailed too much labor to be wasted in washing food. The water carried to the houses was for drinking, to wash the hands of chiefs after meals, and those of the kava brewer as well as providing the medium for the kava decoction itself.