The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-08-01
CoCoANUT MILK IN CUBA.

| The New Delicacy Will Make One Wish | for Giraffes Neck-New Possessions Abound in Cocoanuts and in Pineap- ! pies, Which Before the War Were ! Remunerative Products-Delight of the Milk Trickle In Its Native Wild.
 Next to bananas, the most important | product of eastern Cuba is cocoanuts. | The trees grow rapidly, without culti vation, and every mans field is fringed ! with them. Fruiters buy the nuts at | the rate of eight dollars the thousand; and they are hulled on the island, ground in primitive mills and pressed ! for oil. Or, correctly speaking, we should put it in the past tense, and say this was done up to a few weeks ago. l Now every industry, however simple, is | paralyzed. Spanish soldiers, almost as hungry as the starving people, occupy | every village and hamlet and prey like | locusts on the devastated land.
 The Cuban process of extracting oil from the cocoanut resembles that by which Texans make oil from cotton | seed. The "cake" of solid residue is fed to the pigs-about the only Tive stock" ever successfully raised in east ern Cuba-and the shells are used for fuel in the sugar factories. So far the oil has been locally employed only as lubricator for sugar-making machine | ry-a wicked waste of valuable materi- al it seems to those who ars familiar with the splendid possibilitis of the l product. Here is an unequalled open l ing for the manufacturer of palm oil | soap, cocoa-fbre mats, hats, etc, to say nothing of the hundred other uses to which parts of the tree, it's fruit and flores, may be put. The saying goes that a cocoa tree bears nut for every day in the year. In time of peace one l might buy a dozen nuts for twenty cent coin anywhere in the rural dis tricts of Cuba; and he who has never tasted the milk from one freshly gathered can have no idea what is meant by ia draught fit for the gods. !" In their proper state, however, the nuts are not brown and hard, as you see them in northern markets; they look like enormous pale green apples, slight ly elongated--for each still wears it's Robin Hood jacket, which is removed before shipment. Being still alive" as they say on the island, it's shell is soft and easily cut with the machete or long -bladed knife which every country man carries; or your own pocket knife may answer the purpose. Make a hole in one end of the nut about the size of half dollar and out gushes the milk like living spring; not by any means such sour stuff as you have seen come out of cocoanuts at home, white as chalk and thick as buttermik.
 Give one of those imported things tc monkey, pining in captivity for its native food, and he will refuse it with scorn and indignation.
 The trouble is that the cocoanuts ot commerce are gathered before they are ripe and entirely spoiled in transit
 The fluid shut up within it should have no suggestion of milk but be colorless as water, with slight sparkle like that from some clear mountain spring, ex- cept for a slightly sweet and most de. licious flavor; and if freshly picked ir the early morning, after the nut has been swinging all night in the coo
 breezes, the liquid is almost ice cold
 Where cocoanuts grow you never sec inside of their shells any of that hard
 white layer which northerners grate and "desiccate" Gone might as well say desecrate), for in its best estate the nut has no such substance; only creamy white film inside of it, hardly thicker than your thumb nail, which is scraped off with spoon when eaten. Before drinking the juice the ''tenderfoot" gen erally pours it out into another vessel than that which nature intended but the sophisticated epicure tilts the coco anut at just the right angle to let the milk" trickle gently down his throat
 and, like the old toper we have heard of, he wishes his throat were a mile long. There is nothing in the wide world more nourshing or fattening, more health-restoring and youth-pre- serving. Emaciated invalids are re- commended to begin on the juice of half dozen nuts day. the dose to be increased according to the patients in- clination. And the invalid is yet to be discovered who does not develop a taste for it so rapidly that in a weeks time half dozen nuts at single sitting will hardly satisfy him. Each full grown nut contains nearly pint of this true fountain of youth" the same, perhaps, which the old Conquistadores sought vainly far and wide expecting to find it gushing out of the earth in Il some sequestered spot, instead of hang ing, green and beautiful, everywhere overhead. The big nuts grow in bunch- ] es, five or six on a stem, away up near the top of the tall tree, just under it's crown of plume-like leaves. A native, young or old thinks nothing of shin- i ming up a smooth branchless trunk. which looks like telegraph pole, tow ering straight and slender from fifty to one hundred feet whacking off the nuts with his machete (carried up in his teeth), and tossing them down with the ease and agility of his ancestors, the monkeys. No cocoanut ever falls from the parent stem until it is too old and withered to be good for anything. The poorest denizen of the tropics would l disdain to eat such windfalls, and so they are shipped to the north, to be eat en by those who know no better
 Nowhere on the globe do pineapples thrive as in eastern Cuba, where the conditions of soil and climate bring .'the golden apples of Hesperides'' to l absolute perfection, yet the pineapple | industry has never had much attention in this section. Here is another chance for the enterprising Yankee. A tract