Lesson 17 Plants Useful for Food (Ⅳ)

Fruits and Nuts

Our recent investigations have led us to assign to certain fruits their proper and distinctive title as actual breadstuffs. The populations in many parts of the world depend to a very large extent upon the fruits natural to the soil for their daily food. Thus the Arab of North Africa and Arabia lives almost entirely on the date; the Negro of the tropics on the banana; the South Sea Islander on the breadfruit.

We in temperate climates regard fruit rather as a luxury than a necessary of life. The commonest English fruits are the apple, pear, plum, cherry, apricot, peach, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, and currants etc., most of which are cultivated in all parts of the country; but in addition to this, their home-grown supply, they every year import immense quantities of fruit. Steam navigation has had the effect of bringing distant lands into such close touch with our own, that we are able to enjoy all the year round, at moderate cost, the fruits of foreign countries in addition to those of our own country. Much foreign fruit supply comes from Spain, Malta, the Madeiras, the Canary Isles, the United States, and the West Indies. Tasmania has of late years sent us immense cargoes of excellent apples.

In 1886 England imported fruit to the value of ￡3,652,225 sterling. This, in addition to their generous homegrown supply, shows the high place which fruit takes as an article of food. In the same year (1886) England's imports of apples alone amounted to no less than 3,261,460 bushels, and more than half of this quantity came from the United States.

Englands annual imports of oranges and lemons amount to nearly 5,000,000 bushels. The greater part of these come from Spain, but Sicily, Malta, and the West Indies all contribute largely as well.

The St. Michael's (the smallest and most delicately flavored variety of the fruit) takes its name from one of the Azores, or Western Islands, where it was first exclusively grown.

The Seville orange (from the south of Spain) is distinguished by its slightly bitter taste, and is used in the manufacture of marmalade. The Malta orange is a seedless variety, with a crimson pulp; they are commonly called blood oranges. The European fruit are distinguished as a rule by their smooth, thin skins; they come to us rolled up separately in thin white paper. The West Indian variety are coarser and rougher-skinned fruit. They are not packed in separate papers.

The lemon, sweet lime, shaddock, and citron come mostly from Madeira, and large quantities of pineapples are imported from the Azores and Bahamas. The banana of Central America and the West Indies, and the pomegranate of Southern Asia are both to be seen in the fruiterers' shops, and hundreds of tons of fresh grapes are imported, most of which come from Spain.

In addition to the fruits we have already mentioned, and which are known as raw or green fruits, we see in the grocers' shops others, such as raisins, currants, and figs, which have been dried in the sun. England's annual imports of these dried fruits amount to no less than 20,000 tons. Raisins come from Valencia and Malaga in Spain; sultanas (a seedless variety) from Smyrna; currants from Smyrna and the Ionian Islands; figs chiefly from Smyrna.

It should be carefully borne in mind that the name currant has nothing to do with English red, white, and black currants. Raisins and currants are both dried grapes. The currant takes its name from Corinth; it is the Corinth grape.

Nuts, like fruit, form an important article of commerce. The most wonderful nut in the world is the coconut, and it is the fruit of perhaps the most wonderful tree in the world—the coconut palm.

This tree, we already know, has nothing whatever to do with the cocoa-tree, which supplies the material for the well-known beverage. It is very widely distributed throughout the tropics, and is to be met with in the East and West Indies, in Central America, in India and Ceylon, and in all the islands of the Pacific and Indian Archipelagoes. In Ceylon there are extensive plantations of these palms, said to contain no fewer than twenty millions of trees.

The trees are usually found fringing the low shores. They are stately trees, rising often to the height of 100 feet; the summit is crowned with feathery leaves from 12 to 15 feet in length. They bear immense bunches of flowers, and when these die off, they give place to the fruit—the coconut of commerce. The tree usually bears about sixty nuts each year.

The nuts, as we see them in the shops, have been stripped of their outer covering, which is a thick, fibrous case, or husk. This supplies the material for coconut matting, brushes, etc.

To the natives of the lands where it grows this tree is invaluable; its uses are said to equal in number the days of the year. They build their houses, and make every utensil and household article they require from the wood of the trunk. They thatch their houses with the leaves, and the fibrous husk of the nut supplies them with material for matting. The nut itself forms an important part of their food; the milk supplies them with drink, and they make palm wine and arrack—a spirituous liquor—from the fermented juice or sap of the flowers. From the kernel of the nut coconut oil is obtained. The timber of the trunk is also a valuable article of commerce, known as porcupine wood.

England imports annually about ￡300,000 worth of cocoa-nut oil from India and Ceylon. Most of it is used in the manufacture of marine soap—a soap that will form a lather with seawater.

Among the other common nuts are the filbert, walnut, almond, chestnut, and Brazil nut. Hazelnuts and filberts are natives of England, but they import large quantities from Spain, under the name of Barcelona nuts.

The walnut is also grown in England, but they import many thousand bushels every year from Germany and the South of France. The almond belongs to the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. There are several varieties—the sweet, the bitter, the Valencia, and the Jordan almond. The last has nothing to do with the river Jordan. The name is a corruption of jardin, the French word for garden. The chestnut is extensively grown in Spain and Italy. The people of Lombardy mix chestnuts with their lupin meal to make their bread. Chestnuts are largely imported from Holland and Belgium. The Brazil nut is the fruit of a large tree which grows mostly in the region near the Orinoco. The fruit is a smooth, round case, half as big as a man's head, and in it the three-sided nuts are packed closely together, as many as twenty or thirty in one case. It is extremely dangerous to pass under the trees when the fruit is growing ripe; for the nut cases, owing to their great weight, frequently fall as they ripen.

The natives have a novel way of obtaining the nuts without the trouble of climbing the tall trees. The forests are swarming with monkeys. They chase the monkeys into the trees, and then pelt them with small pebbles. The monkeys, in turn, pluck the nut-cases from the trees, and hurl them down at their assailants.