The large fleshy tubers of tacca, when scraped and frequently washed, yield a nutritious fecula resembling arrowroot.

Salep consists chiefly of bassorin, some soluble gum, and a little starch.  It forms an article of diet fitted for convalescents when boiled with water or milk.  The price of salep is about eight guineas per cwt. in the London market.  A little is exported from Constantinople, as I noticed a shipment of 66 casks in 1842; excellent specimens from this quarter were shown in the Egyptian department of the Great Exhibition in 1851.  It was formerly a great deal used, but has latterly been much superseded by other articles.

Major D. Williams ("Journal of the Agri. and Hort.  Soc. of India,” vol. iv., part I), states that the tacca plant abounds in certain parts of the province of Arracan, where the Mugs prepare the farina for export to the China market.

After removing the peel, the root is grated on a fish-skin, and the pulp having been strained through a coarse cloth, is washed three or four times in water, and then dried in the sun.

According to a recent examination of the plant by Mr. Nuttall ("American Journal of Pharmacy,” vol. ix., p. 305), the Otaheite salep is obtained from a new species of tacca, which he names T. oceanica.

For many years we have obtained from Tahiti, and other islands of the South Seas, this fecula, known by the name of Tahiti arrowroot, probably the produce of Tacca pinnatifida.  It is generally spherical, but also often ovoid, elliptic, or rounded, with a prolongation in the form of a neck, suddenly terminated by a plane.

The tacca plant grows at Zanzibar, and is found naturalised on the high islands of the Pacific.  The art of preparing arrowroot from it is aboriginal with the Polynesians and Feejeeans.

At Tahiti the fecula is procured by washing the tubers, scraping off their outer skin, and then reducing them to a pulp by friction, on a kind of rasp, made by winding coarse twine (formed of the coco-nut fibre) regularly round a board.  The pulp is washed with sea water through a sieve, made of the fibrous web which protects the young frond of the coco-nut palm.  The strained liquor is received in a wooden trough, in which the fecula is deposited; and the supernatant liquor being poured off, the sediment is formed into balls, which are dried in the sun for twelve or twenty-four hours, then broken and reduced to powder, which is spread out in the sun further to dry.  In some parts of the world cakes of a large size are made of the meal, which form an article of diet in China, Cochin-Caina, Travancore, &c., where they are eaten by the natives with some acid to subdue their acrimony.

Some twenty varieties of the Ti plant (Diacaena terminalis) are cultivated in the Polynesian islands.  There is, however, but one which is considered farinaceous and edible.  In Java the root is considered a valuable medicine in dysentery.