The Preparation of the Cacao Beans.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century the manufacture of chocolate was carried on entirely by hand, a method at once laborious and inefficient. The workman used to kneel down on the ground, and crush the beans in iron mortars. It was not until 1732[105] that Buisson introduced the use of a bench and so rendered that inconvenient and unwholesome practice unnecessary. Even to-day, the Chinese cooks on the Philippine islands carry their chocolate “Factory” about with them, in which the trestle is essential. It further comprises a small marble mortar and warmed pestle, and by means of these utensils and implements the hulled beans are pounded, and the triturated mass so obtained spread out. It is then flavoured with sugar and spices. With that exception, hand labour in the chocolate manufacture has since the year 1778 been entirely displaced by machinery, when Doret exhibited the first specimen before the medical faculty of Paris. According to Belfort de la Roque,[106] a Genoese named Bozelly had already constructed a mill by means of which he was able to prepare from six to seven hundred pounds of chocolate daily, comparing favourably with the thirty pound output yielded by hand labour. Pelletier[107], in 1819, describes a machine for the mechanical preparation of chocolate of his own construction, capable of doing the work of seven men. The machines used in the chocolate manufacture have since that time been repeatedly improved and re-constructed, although always with this one end in view, namely to obtain a fine even cacao mass, and afterwards mix it as thoroughly as possible with the other ingredients employed.
The first machines of the modern type were constructed by the Parisian mechanic George Hermann (1801-1883) in the year 1830, to which inventor we are indebted for the principle of fine grinding with varying velocities, on which manufacture of chocolate is based to-day. There is at the present time a rather large circle of manufacturers engaged in the putting together of special machines for the preparation of cacao and cacao products, chocolate apart.
Whether chocolate manufacture be carried out on a large or small scale, it always involves the subjecting of the cacao bean to a regularly succeeding series of operations, before the resulting product known as “Chocolate” (in the strict commercial sense of the term) can be obtained.
The respective operations succeed each other as follows:
I. Preparation of the Beans.
1. Storing, cleansing and sorting of raw beans.
2. Roasting the cleansed beans.
3. Crushing, shelling and cleansing the roasted bean (removing the radicles etc.)
4. Mixing different kinds of beans.
II. Production of the Cacao Mass.
5. Grinding the beans till they yield a homogenous paste on heating.
6. Mixture of the liquefied cacao mass with sugar, spices, etc.
7. Trituration by rollers.
III. Preparation of the resulting Chocolate.