Report of the commissioner for 1878 : part VI.

  • United States Fish Commission.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the commissioner for 1878 : part VI. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    196/1174 (page 94)
    are, the less will their agreeable taste suffer; the poorer, the greater such danger. Experiments have been made with all kinds of provisions, drinks, and fruit. The result so far reached is this, that every kind endures a cer- tain low temperature, below which one cannot venture without injuring the flavor. Especially fruit and most kinds of flowers are very sensi- tive in this respect. To treat them directly with ice-cold air will, I think, not succeed; but perhaps the indirect method, or the now com- mon cold-air method for cooling off the preserving-room will do better. Pork is also somewhat difficult to handle, but for a different reason: it requires such intense cold to be entirely protected. Again, it has been found that the more uniform the cold is kept the better. My informant states that the use of ice as a means of preserving these articles dates back only twelve years. A patent for freezing sal- mon had yielded the patentee $30,000 to $40,000; but while the patent was respected concerning salmon, competitors soon learned that the patent-right was not infringed upon by employing freezing for other provisions, and after a lawsuit respecting it the patentee lost, as the tribunal declared that freezing other articles of food than salmon was free or not patented. At the same time the use of ice is considered yet to be in its infancy, or taken as a whole only to have acquired impor- tance in the treatment of salmon and some other flsli-wares, together with fresh meat. With regard to fruit no one has gone beyond experi- ment; but as soon as the proper ice treatment is discovered one must admit that America will export to Europe large quantities of fresh fruit,* just as is already the case with fresh meat, and experimentally with fresh salmon. vi r. TWO KINDS OF REFRIGERATORS ON BOARD PACKET STEAMERS FOR CARRYING FRESH MEAT. As the transportation of fresh meat from America to Europe in steam- ers has attracted marked attention, and as a similar transfer ol fresh fish will perhaps in time become an example for the Norwegian fish and game dealers, I undertook a journey across in a- steamer which was fur- nished with cooling-off apparatus (refrigerators), and then remained many days in Liverpool to investigate the condition of the meat after the voy- age, and to make myself better acquainted with all the details of the arrangement. So far as my experience goes, the method employed in the transporta- tion of fresh meats across the Atlantic is copied from a rather common method of refrigeration used by the pork-butchers in the A est. i his last- * Fruit-growing is a great industry in the United States. Much is exported in tlio form of conserved and preserved fruit. Of all kinds of apples alone were exported in 1875, as officially advised, more than $1,000,000 worth.