The best way to proceed is to open the pods at once after they are gathered, and put the beans in a box that slowly revolves, so as to give them uniform treatment, without loss of heat during the days they ferment, and lose their bitter principle. A week usually suffices.
The seeds are washed clean, then graded by sizes for even roasting in rotating, heated drums. The beans while roasting lose their bitter taste, their starch is converted into dextrin, and the fa miliar aroma of cocoa is developed. Next, the thin hulls are easily loosened by a gentle, rolling press ure, for heat has made them brittle. A winnow ing process separates them, leaving the solid meats, now called "cocoa nibs." They break easily; indeed there is no way to prevent them from breaking while the hulls are being removed. We can buy cocoa as nibs in grocery stores. Some people make cocoa by boiling these. Others are better pleased with the ground beans; the nibs make a beverage too rich for their taste. The difference is this : The nibs contain cocoa oil; it constitutes 5o per cent. of the substance of them.
In the manufacture of cocoa, the nibs are ground fine, and the mass is subjected to great pressure. The fat oozes out and hardens into yellowish cocoa butter. What is left is a cake of brown substance, which again goes through the grinders, and is ready to be boxed and labelled for sale. This is the unsweetened cocoa we buy.
The cocoa butter extracted turns white in course of time, but it keeps without becoming rancid; so it is used in making ointments and salves that druggists keep for sale.
One objection to the manufactured cocoa is that it is frequently adulterated with cheap starch like Brazilian arrowroot. Only the reputation of good manufacturers can defend the public from impositions like this. The same is true of choco late manufacturers.
In making a cup of cocoa, the cook usually adds sugar. In making chocolate, she does not. Chocolate is a richer beverage than cocoa. The reason is clear once we know how both are made. Cocoa contains all there is in the nibs except the fat, and it should contain nothing more. To make chocolate, the manufacturer grinds the nibs to a fine powder, adds a certain amount of sugar, flavors with vanilla, and mixes these ingredients into a paste, which is moulded into the tablets and cakes we buy. For cooking purposes, some brands
of chocolate are unsweetened. But the fat is in all grades. Rich as chocolates are, they are poor stuff if the makers have used glucose for sugar and imitation vanilla extract, with a generous amount of cheap starch taking the place of the cocoa they pretend to use. The cheap chocolates are lacking not only in nutritiousness but in the good flavor of the genuine.
The shells that are removed from the nibs are not utterly worthless. The drug, theobromine, is ex tracted from them, as well as from the beans, and they are also used as food for cattle. They con tain elements that enrich the soil, therefore they are dug in as fertilizer in orchards of cacao trees.
TEA.
The American man who goes to London for a short stay knows that the late afternoon is not the time to do business with a Briton. One impor tant engagement calls people of high and low degree — they must go and get their tea. You cannot stay the universal impulse with any protest that your time is limited and your errand urgent. Nothing takes precedence of afternoon tea. The clerks go, and you cannot get waited on in the shops. Every business is shorthanded for the time except the places where tea is served. They are crowded. An army of servants move swiftly forward to save the lives of famishing fellow countrymen, bearing pots of tea and hot water, with little cakes, and thin slices of buttered bread. Before six o'clock the hum of industry is resumed. The man of business is ready to see you. The world is a good place to live in, for everybody is fortified by his tea.
Pretty much the same the traveller finds in other European cities, where the British tourist has impressed upon the inn-keepers the necessity for afternoon tea service of the kind rigidly his own. English tea rooms attract Americans, who readily fall into the tea habit. We wonder how soon, if ever, the business men of America will take to tea-drinking in the late afternoon.