Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

24 THE COCOA AND CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY 4. Improvements in the manufacture of eating chocolate. The beverage, chocolate, had one quality to which objection was often made. This was the richness due to the presence of a superabundance of fat, and, when Van Houten hit upon the idea of pressing out part of the butter, he obtained a product which gave a more easily prepared and more palatable drink. The British Government have always believed in cacao for the Navy, and in the early years of the nineteenth Century the amount taken by the Navy formed the mainstay of British consumption. In 1830 the British Navy con-sumed 176 tons. The British sailor to this day is given the old-fashioned chocolate, and excellent fortification it gives him against the salt breezes. A land-lubber would hesitate to sip this rieh drink, on which. floats a layer of fat; he would always prefer the lighter beverage obtained from cocoa powder, and one suspects that most sailors would also. The method of cocoa production by pressing out part of the butter was not adopted in England until 1866, when Cadbury Bros, introduced their " Cocoa Essence.” Fry & Sons adopted the process for their “ Cocoa Extract ” two years later. Another, and older, method of reducing the fatty richness of the ground cacao bean was to mix with it some cereal product. This had been done from the earliest times ; thus the Mexicans used maize. This addition, however, was condemned even as early as 1685. In J. Chamberlaine’s translation of Colmenero’s book, it states : “ those that mix maize in the chocolate do very ill, for they beget bilious and melancholly humours. It is certain that it begets Choler and Windy-ness, and that they do not make use of this ingredient but for their own profit and the quantity of the chocolate.” The objection to maize on the ground