Cooking Articles & Recipes

Cooking with Chocolate: Cooking Tips & Delicious Chocolate Recipes

Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes

COCOA AND CHOCOLATE

In reality, if one examines the nature of chocolate a little, with respect to the constitution of aged persons, it seems as though the one was made on purpose to remedy the defects of the other, and that it is truly the panacea of old age."  The three associated beverages, cocoa, tea, and coffee are known to the French as aromatic drinks. Each of these has its characteristic aroma. The fragrance and flavor are so marked that they cannot be imitated by any artificial products, although numerous attempts have been made in regard to all three. Hence the detection of adulteration is not a difficult matter.

Designing persons, aware of the extreme difficulty of imitating these substances, have undertaken to employ lower grades, and, by manipulation, copy, as far as may be, the higher sorts. Every one knows how readily tea, and coffee, for that matter, will take up odors and flavors from substances placed near them. This is abundantly exemplified in the country grocery or general store, where the teas and coffees share in the pervasive fragrance of the cheese and kerosene. But perhaps it is not so widely understood that some of these very teas and coffees had been artificially flavored or corrected before they reached their destination in this country. 

Cacao lends itself very readily to such preliminary treatment. In a first-class article, the beans should be of the highest excellence; they should be carefully grown on the plantation and there prepared with great skill, arriving in the factory in good condition. In the factory they should simply receive the mechanical treatment requisite to develop their high and attractive natural flavor and fragrance. They should be most carefully shelled after roasting and finely ground without concealed additions. This is the process in all honest manufactories of the cacao products. 

Now, as a matter of fact, in the preparation of many of the cacao products on the market, a wholly different course has been pursued. Beans of poor quality are used, because of their cheapness, and in some instances they are only imperfectly, if at all, shelled before grinding. Chemical treatment is relied on to correct in part the odor and taste of such inferior goods, and artificial flavors, other than the time-honored natural vanilla and the like, are added freely. The detection of such imposition is easy enough to the expert, but is difficult to the novice; therefore the public is largely unable to discriminate between the good and the inferior, and it is perforce compelled to depend almost entirely on the character and reputation of the manufacturer. 

A distinguished London Physician, in giving some hints concerning the proper preparation of cocoa, says:  "Start with a pure cocoa of undoubted quality and excellence of manufacture, and which bears the name of a respectable firm. This point is important, for there are many cocoas on the market which have been doctored by the addition of alkali, starch, malt, kola, hops, etc."  Baker's Breakfast Cocoa is absolutely pure, and, being ground to an extraordinary degree of fineness, is highly soluble.

The analyst of the Massachusetts State Board of Health states in his recent valuable work on "Food Inspection and Analysis," that the treatment of cocoa with alkali for the purpose of producing a more perfect emulsion is objectionable, even if not considered as a form of adulteration. Cocoa thus treated is generally darker in color than the pure article. The legitimate means, he says, for making it as soluble as possible is to pulverize it very fine, so that particles remain in even suspension and form a smooth paste.  That is the way the Baker Cocoa is treated. It has received the Grand Prize—the highest award ever given in this country, and altogether 52 highest awards in Europe and America.   

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