20 MADRAS FISHERIES BULLETIN VOL. XIV, 



The department spends money also upon popularizing a more 

 extended use of fish in the household cuisine of the masses and 

 upon an attempt to make the canning of crabs a cottage industry. 



As regards the former the system of employing travelling 

 instructors is again adopted. The lower classes in Norway retain 

 much of the primitiveness of the old viking life and quantity is 

 more regarded than quality ; methods of cookery are often rude 

 and too frequently, just as in the traditional English workman's 

 cuisine, not nearly the best is made of the food treated. More 

 especially is this the case in regard to fish. Hence one of the 

 department's minor activities is to send lady teachers of fish- 

 cookery to various populous centres to demonstrate better and 

 more tasty modes of treating fish for the table. The main object 

 of the department is primarily to popularize the use of fish in 

 towns and so to increase the consumption and demand for fish. 

 Incidentally it assists in raising the standard of living and in 

 improving the health of the workers. 



The development of crab-canning as a home-industry has been 

 attempted by the Society for the Promotion of Norwegian 

 Fisheries, the most important of the Norwegian fishery societies. 

 The work is carried on with the help of a grant from the depart- 

 ment (Kr. QOO, 1921 22). In Norway, the large edible crab 

 (Cancer paguriis) is common on many parts of the coast line but 

 nowhere in sufficient quantity to warrant the establishment of a 

 fully equipped cannery built and run for this specific purpose ; 

 neither has it been found practical for the sardine canneries to 

 include crab-canning even as a side line. The numbers available 

 are too limited and the supply too erratic to make the proposition 

 worth consideration in a cannery which must turn out thousands 

 of tins a day if it is to be a commercial success. Hence the 

 attempt has been made to devise a canning plant of the utmost 

 simplicity at a cost within the means of the ordinary inshore 

 fisherman, who owns perhaps one small row-boat and a number of 

 crab-pots, the whole operated by himself and a boy. The society 

 makes arrangements for the supply of tins — bodies and covers — to 

 the worker, greatly simplifying the proposition, which is then 

 resolved into instruction in the proper manner of (a) the extraction 

 of the flesh of the crab, after cooking, (b) the attractive packing 

 of this into the body of the tin, (c) soldering on the cover, (d) 

 testing, exhausting, and tipping, and (e) sterilizing. An itinerant 



