The necessary quantities having been weighed and duly stirred together with a large wooden spoon, are poured into a mould nearly three feet in length, about nine inches wide, and from three to four inches deep; and in from four to five hours the mass is sufficiently solid to bear removal, when it is turned out as a large cake or block, which might very well pass for a huge sun-baked brick from Nineveh. In this way any number of cakes may be produced, those made on one day being finally worked up on the next, by which time they have become somewhat more hardened.
In this final process, the cakes are laid one at a time in what resembles a chaff-cutting machine, except, instead of the ordinary broad knife wielded by grooms, that a wheel, armed with four sharp blades, whirls round at the open end. The block of cocoa, held by machinery, advances with a slow continuous motion, until it touches the blades on the wheel, when immediately a cloud of most delicate slices or shavings is thrown off, as rapidly as sparks from a knife-grinder's wheel. Cake after cake is thus comminuted, at the rate of a ton per day from a single machine. The shavings are collected as fast as they fall, and passed through a sieve, which reduces them to that coarse powdery form so well known to all consumers of soluble chocolate. It is then put into barrels, and despatched without delay to the packing-room by means of a railway.
That there is something in a name, is as true of cocoa and chocolate as of other things, and the difference of name implies, in most instances, a difference of manufacture. Hence there is a variety of processes going on within the building, the results of which are shewn in 'Cocoa Paste,' 'Rock Cocoa,' 'Eating Vanilla Chocolate,' 'Penny Chocolate,' 'French Bonbons,' 'Flaked Cocoa,' 'Homoeopathic,' &c. So numerous are the sorts, that a purchaser is as much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, is a sight that provokes astonishment, as much by the rapidity of the operation as by the ease with which it appears to be accomplished, but which has only been arrived at by a persevering circumvention of vexatious difficulties.