86 COCOA 



into technical explanations. Also, they are bent on 

 discovering what we have set our hearts on seeing. 

 Will we, they ask as a favour, mention any department 

 we would specially like to visit. 



In chorus we greet this invitation : We want to see 

 how chocolate is made into bars and cakes, and all our 

 life long we have been wondering how almonds, creme 

 and suchlike dainties get into their chocolate coats. 



On we go to another large, cool and airy room. 

 Canloads of chocolate, in the stiff paste form in which 

 it leaves the mills, are incessantly arriving. The 

 chocolate is fed through a hopper to shallow, oblong 

 tins, divided by ridges into " bar " moulds. The mass 

 is of the particular blend for that fine quality of Fry's 

 plain chocolate called Belgrave, and this name is 

 stamped on the bottom of each section of the moulds. 

 The tins are automatically filled from the hopper, and 

 passed on to a "dancing table"; as they dance up 

 and down throughout the course of their passage along 

 this table, the chocolate paste gets evenly distributed 

 in the sections of the mould. At the far end of the 

 table the tins enter a refrigerator, and when they 

 emerge therefrom, their contents are a solid cake of 

 chocolate. The cakes are turned out of the tins, and 

 either wrapped whole in paper for sale in packet form, 

 or packed in wooden boxes for sale in sections. 



Now we are off and away to the fancy chocolate 

 department. In a series of rooms we watch wholesale 

 quantities of sugar and innumerable other good things 

 being mixed by machinery to make creme, marzipan, 

 nougat, jelly and suchlike dainties for the " centres " 

 of fancy chocolates. In near neighbouring rooms we 

 see white-coated men rolling out nougat ; white-frocked 



