Cocoa and Chocolate: Their History from Plantation to ConsumerKnapp, Arthur William
History
Cocoa and Chocolate: Their History from Plantation to Consumer
Knapp, Arthur William
Chocolate; Cocoa
In this process, by the mere act of grinding, the miracle is performed
of converting the brittle fragments of the cacao bean into a
chocolate-coloured fluid. Half of the cacao bean is fat, and the
grinding breaks up the cells and liberates the fat, which at blood heat
melts to an oil. Any of the various machines used in the industries for
grinding might be used, but a special type of mill has been devised for
the purpose.
In the grinding room of a cocoa factory one becomes almost hypnotised by
a hundred of these circular mill-stones that rotate incessantly day and
night. In Messrs. Fry's factory the "giddy motion of the whirling mill"
is very much increased by a number of magnificent horizontal driving
wheels, each some 20 feet in diameter, which form, as it were, a
revolving ceiling to the room. Your fascinated gaze beholds "two or
three vast circles, that have their revolving satellites like moons,
each on its own axis, and each governed by master wheels. Watch them for
any length of time and you might find yourself presently going round and
round with them until you whirled yourself out of existence, like the
gyrating maiden in the fairy tale."
In this type of grinding machine one mill stone rotates on a fixed
stone. The cacao nib falls from a hopper through a hole in the centre of
the upper stone and, owing to the manner in which grooves are cut in the
two surfaces in contact, is gradually dragged between the stones. The
grooves are so cut in the two stones that they point in opposite
directions, and as the one stone revolves on the other, a slicing or
shearing action is produced. The friction, due to the slicing and
shearing of the nib, keeps the stones hot, and they become sufficiently
warm to melt the fat in the ground nib, so that there oozes from the
outer edge of the bottom or fixed stone a more or less viscous liquid or
paste. This finely ground nib is known as "mass." It is simply liquified
cacao bean, and solidifies on cooling to a chocolate coloured block.
[Illustration: SECTION THROUGH GRINDING STONES.]
This "mass" may be used for the production of either cocoa or chocolate.
When part of the fat (cacao butter) is _taken away_ the residue may be
made to yield cocoa. When sugar and cacao butter are _added_ it yields
eating chocolate. Thus the two industries are seen to be
inter-dependent, the cacao butter which is pressed out of the mass in
the manufacture of cocoa being used up in the production of chocolate.
The manufacture of cocoa will first be considered.
(_i_) _Pressing out the excess of Butter._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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