CIGARETTE SECRETS.

Shannon News, 17 August 1923, Page 3

CIGARETTE SECRETS.

As much care goes to the makin,; of fine Turkish cigarettes as to cigars, that is why they are the aristocrat of the cigarette world and also why they are expensive. I saw an elderly Macedonian, who has been plying his razor-sharp knife in London for a quarter of a century, place tobacco leaf gently in a kind of primitive chaff cutter, press it firmly, and then slice it so skilfully with his knife that the tobacco was almost ns long and silky as a woman’s hair. ; . “His hands are more clever * tha n 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 £lB in a week. Hu has been doing the work for 47. years now, and, until recently, has jnever.- ! a.lltcd much about it. Now, however, / e is teaching his son, but it will take .oars for the lad to master it, . Olive-skinned girls and lhen sat af i bench rolling into cigarettes tlffi tobacco the old man ! had cut. The most expert of them has rolled 3,006 n nine hours; a modern power machine makes that numbei 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 (hat will please the connoisseur is entrusted only to a man who has proved his taste. It is all a question .of palate and memory. . t An expert can smoke one cigarette and detect the twelve varieties of leaf in it. So sensitive is the palate ana so retentive the memory of some, that 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 l:o make it.. ; The tobacco blender usually inherits his taste and his job; excessive smolhng 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 us. 1 ■„ expensive Turkish cigarettes everywhere. Even if you transplant a variety only o 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 chooe his customers and reap hai- . c*. H in "Daily Mail.”