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Paul Frost
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I doubt that it is German word (or belongs to another Germanic language). If one reads "Grassicher", one could think that it is a compound of the German words "Gras" and "sicher", but that does not make much sense. However, if an English reader believes it is German, he would perhaps pronounce it like "Grassica".

In your source we can read

Ningpo to Shanghai page 2

There is an other occurrence on p. 8:

Ningbo to Shanghai page 8

This shows that "Beans Grassicher" or "Grassicher Beans" is the name of some plant. As you write in your question, Tarrant wants to avoid calling rape by its actual name. I therefore believe, as pointed out in comments and Jan's answer, that Tarrant misspelled the Latin word "Brassica". Whether he really wanted to describe "Brassica napus" (rape) or "Brassica rapa" or something else in this family, remains open. Howewer, in combination with "beans" it is most likely that he meant rape.

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PS. A Google search for "Grassica" yields hits like this and that. This shows that the same misunderstanding still occurs. Moreover, searching for "Krassica" which sounds similar yields a few results like this. The (German) text contains "Brassica", obviously the OCR software did not identify it correctly.

Paul Frost
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