68 COCONUTS, KERNELS, AND CACAO. 



Cocoa-butter is one of the most delicately flavoured 

 and expensive edible fats known to science. When 

 clarified, it is of a pale yellow colour, and only becomes 

 rancid when subjected to excessive heat or light. In 

 ordinary times it is far too expensive to be used as a 

 food, except for making the finest chocolate and the 

 most expensive confectionery, where ordinary fats like 

 lard, suet, margarine, or butter are too impure and coarse 

 to use. For the same reason some of the most valuable 

 ointments and toilet preparations are made from the 

 cocoa-butter. 



During the war, however, when the scarcity of sugar 

 restricted the making of chocolate, and lard the ordinary 

 housewife's cooking fat soared to Is. 6d. and more per 

 pound, cocoa-butter came into use for cooking any 

 article from sweet pastries to fried fish and chipped 

 potatoes. 



The peculiar flavour of the uncooked product, distasteful 

 to most adults, can be eliminated, not only by the addi- 

 tion of a little essence of lemon (an important fact to 

 remember when the fat has gone slightly rancid, owing 

 to long storage in factories), but also by the process of 

 cooking. 



When the fat has been heated for a short time it almost 

 entirely loses its yellow colour, and also its flavour, and 

 becomes a white neutral fat. Hence, if it is essential not 

 to have any flavour of any sort in the resulting articles, 

 all that has to be done is to heat the oil for a few minutes 

 in an ordinary saucepan. It will be found that the 

 resulting fat can be used for frying fish, making chip 

 potatoes, and puddings of all sorts without any trace of 

 cocoa flavour being apparent. 



