[CHAPTER IX]
ADULTERATION AND THE NEED FOR DEFINITIONS
Those that mix maize in the Chocolate do very ill, for they beget bilious and melancholy humours.
A Curious Treatise on the Nature and Quality of Chocolate, Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, 1685.
COCOA.
Cocoa might conveniently be defined as consisting exclusively of shelled, roasted, finely-ground cacao beans, partially de-fatted, with or without a minute quantity of flavouring material.
The gross adulteration of cocoa is now a thing of the past, and most of the cocoa sold conforms with this definition. Statements, however, get copied from book to book, and hence we continue to read that cocoa usually contains arrowroot or other starch. In the old days this was frequently so, but now, owing to many legal actions by Public Health Authorities, this abuse has been stamped out. Nowadays if a Public Analyst finds flour or arrowroot in a sample bought as cocoa, he describes it as adulterated, and the seller is prosecuted and fined. Hence, save for the presence of cacao shell, the cocoa of the present day is a pure article consisting simply of roasted, finely-ground cacao beans partially de-fatted. The principal factors affecting the quality of the finished cocoa are the difference in the kind of cacao bean used, the amount of cacao butter extracted, the care in preparation, and the amount of cacao shell left in.
The presence of more than a small percentage of shell in cocoa is a disadvantage both on the ground of taste and of food value. This has been recognised from the earliest times (see quotations on [p. 128]). In the Cocoa Powder Order of 1918, the amount of shell which a cocoa powder might contain was defined—grade A not to contain more than two per cent. of shell, and grade B not more than five per cent. of shell. The manufacturers of high-class cocoa welcomed these standards, but unfortunately the known analytical methods are not delicate enough to estimate accurately such small quantities, so that any external check is difficult, and the purchaser has to trust to the honesty of the manufacturer. Hence it is wise to purchase cocoa only from makers of good repute.
CHOCOLATE.
We have so far no legal definition of chocolate in England. As Mr. N.P. Booth pointed out at the Seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry: "At the present time a mixture of cocoa with sugar and starch cannot be sold as pure cocoa, but only as 'chocolate powder,' and with a definite declaration that the article is a mixture of cocoa and other ingredients. Prosecutions are constantly occurring where mixtures of foreign starch and sugar with cocoa have been sold as 'cocoa,' and it seems, therefore, a proper step to take to require that a similar declaration shall be made in the case of 'chocolate' which contains other constituents than the products of cocoa nib and sugar." We cannot do better than quote in full the definitions suggested in Mr. Booth's paper.