Tikumu’s letter

Press, 23 September 1980, Page 14

Tikumu’s letter

Dealt Daad&ts

One of the highlights of a special day is nice food shared with family and friends. Birthdays, Christmas, New Year and Easter are our main feast days, but a number of other events in the year call for a celebration. In New Zealand we are lucky to have a wide choice of good food — meat, poultry, sea foods, vegetables, eggs, milk and cream, which are the makings of succulent main courses and delicious desserts. Only a few items which add the finishing touches, are not produced here. Chocolate is one that is made from imported ingredients. Not everybody can eat it, but most people like it. We use chocolate as a flavouring for many things — hot drinks and desserts. Chocolate cake is a great favourite, and now we have chocolateflavoured milk as well. Milk is said to be a perfect food for good health. Perhaps people who do not like it plain will be attracted by the new flavoured variety. Chocolate comes in many shapes and sizes, usually wrapped in coloured foil — fat Father Christmases, Easter eggs and bunnies, and other animals for all seasons, as well as chocolate bars and boxes. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree which grows in two hot parts of the world near the equator. One of the cacaogrowing countries is Brazil in South America. The other is the West African republic, Ghana, which

you read about In the story of Kuala the ox on the “Africa Week” page two weeks ago. The cacao tree needs fertile soil, warmth and moisture, but it does not like direct sunlight, and so it grows in the shade of taller trees, sometimes in thick jungle. Many farmers in Ghana shelter cacao trees among tall plantains which produce banana-like fruit. The large leaves of plantain trees also serve a useful purpose later, at harvest time. Cacao farms in Ghana are small in area, not much more than two hectares. Cacaos take about four or five years to bear. An unusual feature of the tree is that it produces hundreds of flowers from the bare trunk as well as the branches. Many of the flowers form cacao pods which grow to a length of , about 20 cm and turn yellow when ripe. The main harvest in No-vember-December is the busiest time of the year for the farmer and his family. The ripe pods, containing between 30 and 50 beans covered with a sticky pulp, are cut from the trees. Many hands work to open the pods and scoop out the pulpcovered beans. After podding, the beans go through a process of fermentation, which is important to the flavour and quality of the end product. Plantain leaves are spread on the ground to make a mat for the white sticky beans that will be heaped on to it. The great mass is covered with more plantain leaves, and left for five or six days. It is so hot under the leaves that the sticky pulp becomes a liquid and drains away. The beans begin to turn brown as the flavour develops. After fermentation the beans are spread out to dry in the warm air. Then the work of the cacao farmer and his family is nearly finished. Only two things remain to be done. First, the beans must be packed in sacks for transport to the nearest buying station run by the Cacao Marketing Board. The last chore is no hardship at all — receiving the cash payment for the season’s crop. The Cocao Marketing Board sells the beans to different countries round the world. Some of them are sold and shipped to New Zealand chocolate manufacturers. In the factories, the cacao beans pass through many processes before they reach us in interesti n g, gaily-wrapped shapes with delicious fill, ings. But that is another story.

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