Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

COLLECTION, TRANSPORT, AND MARKETING 89 those walls. Peering down the corridors of time one hears the murmur of those who have made and lost fortunes through the rise and fall in the prices of stränge raw products that half the world has never seen. How many drinkers of cocoa could describe a cacao bean ? It is about the size of an almond, though plumper and less pointed. The skin or shell is brown. Under the Shell at the broader end is the germ or radicle, which is hard, rod-shaped, and about one-fifth of an inch long. The inside (the cotyledons) of the bean may be milk-chocolate colour, brown, dark-brown, purple, or slate. The taste is fatty, more or less bitter and astringent, nutty and faintly aromatic. The odour of the raw bean is quite unlike chocolate ; it is peculiar to raw cacao and contains a vinegary constituent. Not a single bean is to be seen at the auction. However learned the babble of the sale room may be, the auctioneer does no varnishing ; he merely puts up the lots under a brief and accurate description. It is possible, however, to obtain samples before the day of sale, and these are always on show in trays at the various brokers’ Offices on the previous day. It is usual for prospective buyers to see these samples before going to the sale and to make notes on their lists against the various lots offered. The cacao bought and sold may run into many thousands of bags, but it is only a small quantity com-pared with that which is sold by private contract for forward delivery, and an increasing amount of cacao is now bought, not according to sample, but according to type or specification. The public auction is of interest, not on account of the quantities sold, but because it gives periodically to the cacao world a definite indication of the trend of prices. The Price of Cacao. Only for one brief year in its