Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

si'-j B E fe €< 4<- 52 THE COCOA AND CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY cacao. In some places, e.g. the Gold Coast, one sometimes sees pruning pcissors worked by a cord. At first one wonders at the keen eye of the native pickers, which enables them to detect the subtle colour changes in the pods which denote ripeness, until one remembers how readily one can judge the ripeness of the various kinds of apples in which the colour changes are equally subtle. The pods which fall to the ground are gathered by the women into baskets which, when füll, they carry on their heads, and convey with a graceful leisurely motion to an appointed place in the plantation. Gradually a heap of the ripe fruit is made. It would be an advan-tage to leave these pods for a day or two before breaking them, but, in spite of watchmen, the danger of theft is too great to allow of this. The workers squat round the heap and cut the pods open. The old methods of strik-ing one pod against another, or banging them on the ground or against a log of wood, are now happily rare. A sharp cut with the cutlass, a neat turn of the wrist and the top half of the pod is off. The beans are now scooped out, preferably with a wooden spatula, and heaped on banana leaves. Any defective beans or diseased pods are carefully kept separate from the rest. The glistening, snow-white, or heliotrope-tinged mass of beans is wet and mucilaginous, and the fruity juice drips from it as it is conveyed in baskets on the backs of mules, or in small railway trucks as in San Thomé, to the fermenting house. The Fermentation Process.1 In the preparation of the raw cacao for the market, no process which it 1 The major part of this section was originally published in the Handbook to the International Tropical Products Exhibition, 1921.