Cheroot
From Free net encyclopedia
The Cheroot or Stogie is a cylindrical cigar with both ends clipped during manufacture. Since cheroots do not taper, they are inexpensive to roll mechanically, and their low cost makes particularly popular. Typically, stogies have a length of 3.5 to 6.5 inches, and a ring gage of 34 to 37. (Ring gage is a measure of diameter, scaled in 64ths of an inch. A stogie is slightly over 1/2" in diameter.)
The term stogie is often misused to refer to any cigar with a foul stench, and it's an honest mistake. Many stogies are made of flavored tobaccos, and given that a stogie may last a half hour, as opposed to the 2-3 minutes that a cigarette typically lasts, there is quite a funk produced.
The word stogie is short for Conestoga. The cigar was the smoke of choice for teamsters driving Conestoga wagons in the cigar-making Conestoga valley area around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The word cheroot comes from French cheroute, from Tamil curuttu/churuttu/shuruttu - roll of tobacco. This word could have been absorbed into the French language from Tamil during the early 16th century, when the French were trying to stamp their presence in South India. The word could have then been absorbed into English from French.[1]
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Manufacture
Avanti Cigar of Scranton, Pennsylvania only sells a third as many cigars as in the 1960s, but they still produces more all-tobacco cigars than any other US company, and they are all Italian-style cheroots, varying in price from about 45 cents to perhaps $1.25 each. Other companies would use similar processes.
Avanti's filler tobacco, purchased at auction, is fermented in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for 61 days before being shipped to the Scranton, Pennsylvania factory in hogsheads - huge, round wooden containers. It's still wet from the fermenting process, but is dried slowly before being sent to the factory floor. The wooden fixtures are antiques, but manufacturers are loathe to introduce new fixtures that may introduce strange new odors or flavors.
The filler is rolled with two layers of wrapper. Individual leaves are sliced along the center vein, with the left and right are kept separate, as they are rolled in opposite direction. The cigars are cured, with the wrapper fermenting, and the filler binding to the wrapper. At this point, the cigars look somewhat like the Slim Jim meat snacks. Halfway through the six-month curing process, most of the cheroots are cut in two, looking more like a cigar. When the curing process is complete, some of the hardened cigars are packaged immediately, while others are flavored with liquor and packaged the following day. Those cigars are stacked in racks, and the ends painted - by hand, using a trim-size paint brush - with bourbon, anisette, red wine, or vamilla.
The Toscano-style cigars produced by Avanti are hard and dry, unlike many other cigars, and do not stand up to chewing; they may disintegrate if one even bites down hard.
Although tobacco is grown in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, Avanti's wrapper is a dark-fired tobacco grown only in 11 counties of Kentucky and Tennessee. Avanti buys directly from the farmers; the only other customers for that crop are a Swiss manufacturer and the Italian government cigar monopoly.
Mark Twain on cigars
Samuel "Mark Twain" is shown smoking a stogie in many of his photographs. His beloved did not approve of such a vile habit, and he made many jokes about this preference for inexpensive cigars. At one lecture, he indicated that he paid $5 a barrel for his cigars because he was incurably extravagant.
Mark Twain died April 10, 1910; in the March 26, 1911 New York Times, his 1905 letter to L. M. Powers was quoted as saying, "I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had sixty years' experience. No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than anybody else. I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents, I know it to be either foreign or half foreign and unsmokable.
"By me I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices, from 20 cents apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them; they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them, and never shall. I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance when you come."
Modern day stogie fans include Rush Limbaugh, and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who offers his own private-label stogies for sale at his winery.
The Asian connection
Cheroots are traditional in Burma and India, consequently, popular among the British during the days of the British Empire. They are often associated with Burma in literature:
- 'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
- An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat -- jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
- An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
- An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
- —Rudyard Kipling, (1892) "On the Road to Mandalay," from Barrack-room Ballads
- "My brother was unlike us in some things, Sahib. He was fond of the sharab called 'Whisky' and of dogs; he drank smoke from the cheroot after the fashion of the Sahib-log and not from the hookah nor the bidi; he wore boots; he struck with the clenched fist when angered; and never did he squat down upon his heels nor sit cross-legged upon the ground. Yet he was true Pathan in many ways during his life, and he died as a Pathan should, concerning his honour (and a woman). Yea—and in his last fight, ere he was hanged, he killed more men with his long Khyber knife, single-handed against a mob, than ever did lone man before with cold steel in fair fight."
- —Captain Percival Christopher Wren, I.A.R., 1912, Driftwood Spars