Fruit Preserving as Work for Women.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 3, 20 January 1909, Page 60

Fruit Preserving as Work for Women.

Fruit-bottling ir; tin- latest industry to afford a splendid opening to educated women of small means (writes a London pa pel 1 .) Miss Edith Bradley, the pioneer of the industry, who is an expert in all agricultural and horticultural matters, ami was for some years warden of Lady Warwick's Agricultural College for Women, has described to an “Express” representative a good steriliser for bottling fruit known as the "Mercia,” which she invented, and which has been used with great success by a very large number of women living in the country who were anxious to add to their slender incomes.“The art of bottling fruit is a simple one to acquire, and the work is essentially fitted for educated women,” she said. “Gooseberries, plums, red currants, raspberries, black currants, apricots, peaches, and tomatoes can be bottled and kept indefinitely. The steriliser, made of tin, consists of three pieews—the body, the lid (with an opening for insertion of thermometer), and a perforated shelf on which to stand the bottles to prevent the heat cracking them. The fruit - to bo sterilised is packed into a glass jar or bottle, which

is then filled with cold water, and closed by a glass or metal cap fastened by a clip or screw. Heat can be supplied to the steriliser in the customary ways. "Most of the fruit bottled is for cooking purposes, and such fruits as black currants and damsons lose much of their roughness, and are vastly improved by bottling. “It is an industry full of possibilities, not one of the least being that it may have the effect of keeping people in the villages and cheeking the rush to the cities by creating local industries. That fresh fruit bottled in this way is keenly appreciated in the winter and spring has been shown in many eases. I know of a baker in a west country town who, with his wife and daughter, began bottling fruit in a very small way some years ago. The demand for the fruit among the miners in South Wales became so great that now he employes one thousand girls to pick blackberries every autumn. "Many farmers complain that it does not pay' them to send fresh fruit to the London market owing to the great foreign competition, and farmers' daughters in mauy parts are now doing well bybottling the fruit and selling it in the countryside.” America is coming rapidly- to the fore with this new career for girls. Alles Louise Cary-Smith, who lives at a house called Pomona, in California, has introduced a valuable addition to invalid diet in the shape of El Verde grape juice, which contains the actual juice of the grape, bottled with infinite care, and is said to be a more valuibl-, nutritive in illness than even beef tea. But successful fruit-bottling is not only confined to American ladies, for the industry is being taken up in many English villages and homes. Lady Algernon Gor-don-Lennon has started the most flourishing and successful work'- at the little village of Broughton, in Oxford-hire.