CIGARETTE SECRETS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 36, 11 August 1923, Page 14

CIGARETTE SECRETS

HOW BLENDING IS CARRIED OUT.

As much care goes to the making of fine Turkish, cigarettes as to cigars, that is why they are the aristocrats'of the cigarette world and also why they •are expensive, writes "S.H." in ' the "Daily Mail." I saw an elderly Mace-' donian, who has been-plying his razorsharp knife in London for a quarter of a century, place tobacco leaf gently in a kind of primitive chaff r cutter, press it firmly, and then slice it so skilfully with his knife that the tobacco was almost as long and silky as- a 'woman's hair.

"Els hands are more clever than any machine," said his employer. "It is their sensitiveness that counts; no one else can cut tobacco as he does. That is why he earns more than £2 a day, and sometimes £18 in a week. He has been doing the -work for 47 years now, and/ until recently, has never talked much about it. Now, however, he is teaching his son, but it will take years for the lad to master it."

Olive-skinned girls and men sat at a bench rolling into cigarettes the tobacco the old man had cut. The most expert of them has rolled 3000 in nine hours; a modern power machine makes that number in a trifle more than three minutes. But the maker of fine cigarettes would never yield his tobacco to the steel of a machine. '

The blending of perhaps a dozen different leaves into super cigarettes that will-please the connoisseur is entrusted only to a man who has proved his taste. It is all a question of palate and memory. An expert can smoke one cigarette and detect the twelve varieties of leaf in it. So sensitive is the palate and so retentive the memory of some, that a blender has been known to recall, when smoking a cigarette of a blend he has not tasted for ten years, the various kinds of leaf that have gone to make it. The tobacco blender usually inherits his taste and his job; excessive smoking is not a vice in which he can indulge. From five to ten cigarettes a. day is his average, with fifteen as the dangerous limit. You cannot- grow the tobacco used in expensive Turkish cigarettes everywhere. Even- if you transplant a variety only a few kilometres the crop will be different. Of late years the cult of the expensive Turkish cigarette has progressed in the United States—where the Virginian cigarette comes from—so that the Balkan cultivator can now choose his customers and reap a rich harvest.