Many novelists have coined large sums by exploiting local color in their tales. There is such a thing as local flavor, too, which awaits the attention of the women or men bright enough to utilize it. Wild fruits and berries, for instance, abound all over the country, many of them being peculiar to one region. These can be used for imparting their flavor to various fruit syrups, jams, and jellies. In the future, thousands of women will doubtless earn a competence by sending to the city markets preserves with such novel and appetizing local flavors. Some are already doing it, and they have found a demand at the women's exchanges usually far in excess of the supply.
The delicious loganberry, now so plentiful on the Pacific Coast, is hardly known in the East. Here is a grand opportunity; and why has no one thought of the commercial possibilities inherent in the luscious mulberry—an incomprehensibly neglected delicacy? There is the salmonberry, too, and other good things of the West, notably in Alaska, which has been called "preeminently a land of small fruits and berries." The flavor of most of the Alaskan berries was found to be excellent, by Walter W. Evans.[25]
Alaska's gold mines will ultimately be exhausted, but the commercial value of the rich and unique flavors of these fruits and berries will endure. Excellent preserves can be made of the wild "Oregon grape," as well as the service berries, unknown in the East. The dry salal berry of Oregon and Washington might be educated and turned to use; and there are many others.
FEEDING FLAVOR INTO FOOD.
The present chapter might be made as long as this whole book is, for the Flavor is what determines the commercial value of nearly all foodstuffs. I know a young woman who makes deliciously flavored butter and has no trouble in disposing of it for a dollar a pound. Thousands of persons who do not like the butter they can buy are now eating peanut butter, which has the full flavor of the nut. The commercial value of this is shown by the fact that in 1911 a million bushels of peanuts were converted into "butter." Fortunes await those who will manufacture almond "butter," because almonds not only have a more delicate flavor but are more digestible than peanuts.
Storage eggs are quite as nutritious as fresh eggs; the sole difference is in the Flavor; and those of us who can afford to do so, gladly pay twice as much to get the better flavor.
In the preceding chapters I have frequently called attention to the greater commercial value of the best-flavored foods—as in the case of the Bresse chickens, Wiltshire bacon, Southdown mutton, Westphalian ham, Hungarian flour, full-cream cheeses, etc. For a full list see the index under "Commercial Value of Flavor." In this chapter I will call attention to only one more way of increasing the value of things we buy to eat. It is perhaps the most important of all methods—one which points the way to many large fortunes.
Once when I crossed the Atlantic westward on a German steamer the supply of eggs, calculated for nine or ten days, gave out on the fourth because nearly everybody on board was ordering them constantly. They were the best eggs I had ever eaten. The head steward, on being questioned, explained that they came from a farm where a special kind of feed was given to the hens. The farmer had fed that Flavor into the eggs.
At once it flashed on me that great and profitable industries might be built up along that line and I wrote an article about it for The Epoch. That was more than two decades ago. At that time there was not the same interest there is now in dietary questions. More recently, the Department of Agriculture has taken up the matter and in several of its bulletins reference is made to experiments in feeding both unpleasant and pleasant flavors into food.
At the North Carolina Experiment Station, in 1909, hens were fed for two weeks on onions, the result being so strong an onion flavor in the eggs that they could not be used. A week after discontinuing the onions, the hens again laid eggs of normal flavor.