112 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



varieties go to the cannery, though certain sorts have preference, but on 

 the Pacific Coast where peaches are grown for canning, the trade demands 

 a special type. The choice of varieties differs in different locaHties so that 

 a prescription of sorts to grow for the canning trade cannot be made. 

 Canners accept only yellow-fieshed peaches and usually prefer clingstones 

 since these stand up better in the can. This preference is well shown in 

 figures from California, where in 1913 only 583,800 cases, 24 cans to the 

 case, of freestones were canned as against 1,630,255 cases of clingstones. 

 Fashion now demands varieties red at the pit. Most cans in the great 

 pack coming from California are labeled " Lemon Cling," but this is really 

 now but a trade name, the old Lemon Cling, the pioneer sort in the canning 

 trade, being little grown, a dozen or more similar but improved peaches 

 having taken its place. The nectarine is canned in California but is not 

 yet popular with consumers despite the fact that the product is most 

 appetizing and very pleasing in appearance. Its smooth skin makes it 

 one of the easiest of all fruits to can. 



Evaporated peaches. — In regions distant from the markets evapora- 

 tion is an even richer resource of the peach-grower than canning. Thus, 

 in California in 1909, the value of the peaches canned was $3,013,203 while 

 the dried product was valued at $2,333,137. The figures are greater for 

 canned peaches, but be it remembered that the canners' profits and the cost 

 of the cans must be deducted, whereas evaporated peaches are almost 

 wholly a home product, the grower receiving all of the proceeds. The 

 dried product is pure peach, almost devoid of water. Peaches may be 

 cured as dry as a bone and as hard as wood so that the product will keep 

 indefinitely in the temperate zone, and in this super-dried state is shipped 

 to the tropics. The apple is evaporated in large quantities but is a 

 by-product while the cured peach is usually a primary product — a differ- 

 ence worth noting, for, with the apple, the cream of the crop goes to the 

 fresh fruit-market while the cured peach is of the same grade as the dessert 

 and canned fruit. 



The dried-peach industry thrives only in regions, as California, where 

 the summers are sunny and rainless. The product is shipped so cheaply 

 that peach-growers in cloudy and humid climates, as in New York, cannot 

 use artificial heat in evaporators and compete with the cured peaches from 

 the Pacific Slope. In times past when communities were more dependent 

 on local resources, the farmer living almost wholly off of his farm, peaches 

 were cured in humid America though the product, in appearance at least, 



