Fruit Evaporation in America 
211 
its quality and yield surpassed. Scarcely any fresh apples were 
exported from America before 1870, when the drying process was 
unknown, but a million barrels are now sent annually to Europe, 
where they compete successfully with home-grown fruit on account 
of their large size and excellent flavour. 
But it is not only in western New York, or in apples and rasp- 
berries alone, that the business of fruit-drying is nourishing in 
the States. California, long known as a fruit-growing and fruit- 
canning State, has taken up the evaporative process during recent 
years, and is exploiting it with characteristic Western energy. 
In the genial climate of the Pacific coast, grapes, nectarines, figs, 
apricots, and peaches are cultivated to great advantage, and with 
these fruits, — more valuable than the apple, which, however, she also 
produces, — California is now entering the evaporated-fruit markets 
of the world. 
During 18SS there was evaporated in California as follows : — 
Kind of fruit 
Weight in lbs. 
Value in sterling 
18,300.000 
£ 
220,000 
Peaches 
4,000,000 
92,000 
2,600,000 
52,000 
3,100,000 
43,000 
2,000,000 
lfi.OOO 
Nectarines .... 
160,000 
3,840 
350,000 
3,500 
75,000 
900 
25,000 
350 
Totals . . . 
31,450,000 
431,590 
Raisins, it will be observed, form the largest item in this unique 
account of artificially dried fruit. These are rapidly supplanting, in 
the States, raisins of Spanish origin, and their production has in- 
creased from 120,000 lbs. in 1873, to 18,500,000 lbs. in 1888 ! This 
is, indeed, advancing by " leaps and bounds." 
Peaches, which come next in value, would figure for a much 
larger sum, but for the fact that so many Caiifornian peaches are 
canned. 
It may be remarked, in passing, that western New York was 
once also a great peach-growing country, but a disease known as 
" the yellows," as deadly in its field of operations as the phylloxera 
itself, has desolated the peach-orchards of a region which otherwise 
would probably have doubled the value of its dried-fruit product, by 
adding an output of the more costly fruit to that of apples. 
The figures show that the average value of Rochester evaporated 
fruit did not exceed 2d. per lb. in 1888, while tho Caiifornian pro- 
duct netted 3£c£ per lb. all round — prices which sound low when it 
is borne in mind that it takes 8 lbs. of fresh fruit to make 1 lb. of 
evaporated apples. On the other hand, apple-rings sometimes sell 
for from 50*. to GO.t. per hundredweight in the English market. 
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