50 COCOA AND CHOCOLATE 



consummation and would wish the pods to remain 

 unbroken. 



Breaking and Extracting. 



There are planters who believe that the product is 

 improved by leaving the gathered pods several days 

 before breaking ; and they would follow the practice, 

 but for the risk of losses by theft. Hence the pods are 

 generally broken on the same day as they are gathered. 

 The primitive methods of breaking with a club or by 

 banging on a hard surface are happily little used. 

 Masson of New York made pod-breaking machines, 

 and Sir George Watt has recently invented an in- 

 genious machine for squeezing the beans out of the 

 pod, but at present the extraction is done almost 

 universally by hand, either by men or women. A 

 knife which would cut the husk of the pod and was so 

 constructed that it could not injure the beans within, 

 would be a useful invention. The human extractor has 

 the advantage that he or she can distinguish the 

 diseased, unripe or germinated beans and separate 

 them from the good ones. Picture the men sitting 

 round the heap of pods and, farther out, in a larger 

 circle, twice as many girls with baskets. The man 

 breaks the pod and the girls extract the beans. The 

 man takes the pod in his left hand and gives it a sharp 

 slash with a small cutlass, just cutting through the 

 tough shell of the pod, but not into the beans inside ; 

 and then gives the blade, which he has embedded in 

 the shell, a twisting jerk, so that the pod breaks in two 

 with a crisp crack. The girls take the broken pods and 

 scoop out the snow-like beans with a flat wooden spoon 

 or a piece of rib-bone, the beans being pulled off the 

 stringy core (or placenta) which holds them together. 

 The beans are put preferably into baskets or, failing 

 these, on to broad banana leaves, which are used as trays. 



Practice renders these processes cheerful and easy 

 work, often performed to an accompaniment of laugh- 

 ing and chattering. 



