The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

Evaporated peaches.—In regions distant from the markets evaporation is an even richer resource of the peach-grower than canning. Thus, in California in 1909, the value of the peaches canned was $3,013,203 while the dried product was valued at $2,333,137. The figures are greater for canned peaches, but be it remembered that the canners' profits and the cost of the cans must be deducted, whereas evaporated peaches are almost wholly a home product, the grower receiving all of the proceeds. The dried product is pure peach, almost devoid of water. Peaches may be cured as dry as a bone and as hard as wood so that the product will keep indefinitely in the temperate zone, and in this super-dried state is shipped to the tropics. The apple is evaporated in large quantities but is a by-product while the cured peach is usually a primary product—a difference worth noting, for, with the apple, the cream of the crop goes to the fresh fruit-market while the cured peach is of the same grade as the dessert and canned fruit.

The dried-peach industry thrives only in regions, as California, where the summers are sunny and rainless. The product is shipped so cheaply that peach-growers in cloudy and humid climates, as in New York, cannot use artificial heat in evaporators and compete with the cured peaches from the Pacific Slope. In times past when communities were more dependent on local resources, the farmer living almost wholly off of his farm, peaches were cured in humid America though the product, in appearance at least, was much inferior to that from regions having favorable conditions for the evaporation of fruit. New York can hardly hope to compete with California in curing peaches but two factors make it barely possible that this State might make a minor industry out of curing peaches. The factors are the enormous production of peaches in the State, over-production being frequent, and the existence of a great number of apple-evaporators which might be utilized in curing the earlier ripening peaches. It seems worth while, therefore, to go rather fully into the details of curing peaches as practiced in California with the hope that their methods may be modified for use in New York evaporators. The subjoined footnote gives the best account we are able to find of the dried-fruit industry in California and of curing peaches in particular.[209]

The most obvious change which takes place in curing peaches is the loss of water but several other important changes occur which even more materially alter the flavor of the product. According to C. F. Langworthy[210], Chief of the Office of Home Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, the carbohydrates which make up the largest part of the solid matter of fruits undergo greatest changes. The crude fibre, too, is reduced in amount or softened. Much of the starch is changed into some form of sugar and the less soluble sugar may be reduced to a more soluble form. Some of the volatile oils and other ethereal bodies, so important in giving flavor to fruits, pass off or are modified by the curing processes. These changes insure longer keeping in the product, give it greater food value than fresh fruit, pound for pound, leaving it quite as digestible, but not as refreshing and palatable.

Peach-leather was a common dried peach-product in the old domestic epoch before the coming of railroads, steamboats and the establishment of canning and drying industries. Though not now common, peach-leather is still made in many communities in the East, more particularly in the southeastern states. The peaches are peeled, pitted and then mashed into a thin layer which is dried in the sun or an oven, the resulting product taking on the appearance of leather. Peach-leather is said to keep indefinitely, this being its chief merit.

Peach-brandy is still a commercial product of considerable importance though the amount made nowadays, as compared with that made a hundred years ago before prohibition began to be preached, is but a drop in the bucket when the number of bushels raised is considered. According to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue,[211] the quantity of peach-brandy made in 1908, the last year reported, was 13,649.5 gallons, most of which came from California. Peach-brandy is made by converting the sugar of the fruit into alcohol and then distilling. The finished liquor contains about 50 per ct. alcohol. In European countries, peach-kernels are much used in flavoring a liquor called Eau de Noyau.

According to Bulletin 133, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, valuable fixed and volatile oils can be produced from the kernel of the peach. Peach-stones are now burned as fuel by most canneries, excepting small quantities sold to nurseries for propagation. The possibility of producing oils from the kernels seems well worth looking into, since there is now an enormous waste of this part of the fruit by canneries. Oils extracted from peach-kernels may be used for the same commercial purposes as the almond oils; namely, in medicine, for soaps, cosmetics, perfumes and confections. The processes of extraction and distillation are not complex and establishments equipped with steam would have little difficulty in extracting these oils. It is said, too, that the press-cake from which the oils have been extracted makes valuable stock-foods or fertilizers owing to its high content of nitrogenous matter. It is estimated that in California alone the quantity of peach-pits obtained as a by-products of canneries amounts to 10,000 tons in a normal year; that these would yield from 600 to 1,200 tons of kernels from which 210 to 420 tons of oil could be extracted. The wholesale price of bitter-almond oil, or oils purchased under this name, for which peach-oil could be substituted, is from $3.25 to $4.75 per pound.

Pliny named several medicinal uses for the peach and from his time down the flesh, kernels, leaves, bark and blossoms have had a place in the pharmacopoeia of various countries though nowadays little used except in domestic therapeutics. All of the structures named abound in a bitter and astringent principle and most of them produce hydrocyanic acid upon maceration with water. The peach might have value in medicine for this acid were not the chemical more easily obtained elsewhere. The oils from the kernels, as we have seen, may be used in medicine. Noting the medicinal uses to which peach-products have been put by various peoples in various times we find: The leaves are pounded and boiled in vinegar for a liniment, an eye-wash, a cure for "scurf," a preventive of bald heads, and as an insecticide on the heads of children. The blossoms, treated in various ways, have been used for the same ailments and also as a febrifuge. The burned pits are also used in making lampblack for paints.

For more than two thousand years stories have been rife of the poisonous properties of peach-pits and peach-leaves. In a careful perusal of peach-literature for this period and in several languages we have not found a single case cited of fatal results to man or beast from eating the leaves or kernels of peaches. No doubt these stories arise from common knowledge that parts of the peach, as the kernels and possibly the leaves, contain prussic acid though in so minute quantities as never to be toxic in any quantity likely to be eaten by humans or animals. No doubt, too, the myth that the Persians sent the peach to the Egyptians as a deadly poison is still perpetuated.

The wood of the peach is fine-grained and takes a beautiful polish and in Europe is used somewhat in cabinet-work and toy-making. Its numerous reddish-brown veins make it a most beautiful wood but the trees seldom attain sufficient size to give the species value as a lumber-product.

The peach is attractive to the eye at all seasons. A tree or an orchard in bloom is a strikingly beautiful sight while a panorama in a peach-country in flowering-time is one of the most beautiful scenes in nature. There is a great difference in the floral beauty of varieties, some sorts having very inconspicuous flowers while others rank with our finest ornamentals when in bloom. Several types of Prunus persica are planted for beauty of flower and foliage but the fruit-producing peaches are almost never planted for landscape effect though their peculiarly sunny expression in leaf and flower, one of the best types of cheerfulness among trees, should make them useful either standing alone or in mass for ornamental planting. Those who have seen the wild wayside peaches of Kentucky or Tennessee in bloom will always think of the species as an ornamental as well as a fruit-tree.