| Show In a California Fruit Valley II Dead sea fruIt I Thats what I call Itl exclaimed a gentleman who after attempting to eat one of the largest and most beautiful specimens of California peaches ever seen In Fulton Ful-ton Market threw It away In disgust And ho was right for while It was an object to delight the eye with Its great size perfect shape delicate bloom and superb coloring Its flavor was decidedly decided-ly vegetable So New Yorkers of experience ex-perience in such things buy California peaches to look at and to servo with the dessert as the crowning ornaments of a perfect dinner but lay In a supply of Delawares to eat while In Chicago they say Oh yes California peaches are pretty but the St Jo product Is good enough for us Having thus persuaded themselves that all California peaches are tasteless and Insipid dwellers In tho East wonder won-der why tho same article put up incans In-cans should bo so finely flavored and generally superior to canned peaches from elsewhere But the proposition Is a very simple one The peach for canning can-ning Is not plucked until It Is ripe with all Its Juicy richness and delicate flavorfully flavor-fully developed while that Intended for shipment to a distance Is gathered while still hard and devoid of everything every-thing Gave color and size The California Califor-nia peach In Its native orchard sun warmed and ripened until so filled with rich Juices that It Is ready to drop from the tree Is a perfect fruit as pleasing to the taste as to the eye but only under such conditions can It attain at-tain perfection When It Is plucked Its development Is arrested and after that It will only soften Thus there Is as much difference between a California Califor-nia peach In Califoinla and the same thing In New York as there Is between a pineapple luscious and sugaroweet In Its tropic field and the pineapple of Northern markets acid fibrous and bearing every evidence of having been cut long before the date of Its maturity The largest prune orchard In this country If not In the world Is located at Los Gatos the cats on the western edge of tho Santa Clara valley It contains con-tains 380 acres of trees 120 of which are planted to the acre Over one hundred men and a score of teams are constantly constant-ly employed In this great orchard which has Its own waterworks and electriclight plant Its dryingground Is twenty acres In extent and It yields a net Income of something like 50000 a year Near this Los Gatos orchard Is a curious factory said to be the only one of Its kind In the world It Is a factory for the making of grapefood and Is devoted to the extracting and concentrating concen-trating but not fermenting of grape Juice During the season It consumes fifty tons of grapes every day and produces pro-duces 100000 gallons of Juice concentrated concentra-ted to onefourth of Its original bulk The Ingenious process by which this Is accomplished Is simplicity Itself A small but constant stream of fresh Juice flows Into the upper end of a copper cylinder two feet In diameter and nineteen nine-teen feet long which Is Inclined at a slight angle and revolves slowly In a hotwater Jacket that keeps It heated to ICO degrees The Juice forms a film on the Interior of this cylinder the heat evaporates all water from It and the vapor Is drawn off as soon as formed by great exhaustfans that make 200 revolutions per minute The Juice occupies oc-cupies Just sixty seconds In passing through the cylinder and finally trickles from Its lower end In a warm syrupy stream robbed of none of Its original elements or properties save three times Its bulk of water The grapes used In such enormous quantities In this Interesting factory both red and white are wine grapes which as the tourist observer soon discovers dis-covers are very different from raisin grapes the former containing the more Juice and the latter the more saccharine saccha-rine matter One of the surprising things about a raisin vineyard Is the small size of Its vines which being cutback cut-back every year are rarely more than two or three feet high and the great size of the bunches These when fully ripe are cut and laid In shallow trays between the rows of vines where without the addition of any sugar they are allowed to dry In the sun until they become raisins which Is all there Is to the process The most surprising thing of all Is tho discovery that all raisin grapes are whlto grapes until they are turned purple In drying which Is hard to realize real-ize but Is nevertheless a fact Harpers Har-pers Weekly |
