TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL FRUIT-GROWERS* CONVENTION. 115 



scriptural injunction, "Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shalt 

 find it after many days." Treat your trees in a generous fashion, and 

 they will respond generously; act the niggard toward them, and they 

 will repay you in kind. Some Watsonville orchards pay their owners 

 from $150 to $250 an acre per annum, and their yield is so bountiful as 

 to make fortunes for the shippers, whose business is simply to pick, 

 pack, and ship. It is safe to say that so long as apples will bring 75 

 cents to $1.00 f. o. b. there is a handsome profit for the careful grower 

 who handles his own fruit. 



Pie, next on my notes, demands your special attention. At a former 

 convention, Mr. O'Brien suggested, to my astonishment, that it was 

 necessary to start a campaign of education to teach the English people 

 to eat fruit. Having myself had considerable knowledge of that people 

 in their homes, I replied that if Americans would themselves eat fruit 

 as the English do there would be little left to export. Pie in particular 

 does not consist, in England, of a thin layer of over-sweetened fruit 

 between two layers of indigestible, half-baked paste. Your English cook 

 takes a dish of from two to four inches deep, fills it — piled up — with 

 fruit, adding sugar and a drop of water, inverts an empty cup in the 

 center to catch the juice, puts on a light flaky crust, and bakes till the 

 fruit is tender and the crust a rich brown. Then this pie is not served 

 in little saucers, but on large pie plates, and two good platefuls are 

 allowed the hungry schoolboy. 



Pudding is made in the same luscious fashion. A light crust of suet, 

 flour, and water is spread over a cloth (previously wrung out of boiling 

 water and then dredged with flour); apples, cored and sliced, to fill a 

 globe of say eight inches diameter, are then placed, with sugar, cloves, 

 and water, in the crust; the edges thereof are drawn up and welted to 

 make them adhere and form a water-tight globe; the cloth is tied tightly 

 and the pudding plunged into a pot of boiling water and boiled fast for 

 four hours. Apples by the ton are used daily to make these delicious 

 puddings for the city of London alone. If all America would enjoy these 

 splendid combinations of flour and fruit as do the English, Americans 

 would be a healthier, happier, and more "pieus" people; and apple-cul- 

 ture would flourish in the land a thousandfold. 



So mote it be! Amen! 



