We are astonished to see that a Boston dealer in canned goods has failed.
If there is one branch of business that ought to be solid it is that of
canning fruits and things, for there must be the almightiest profit on it
that there is on anything. It must be remembered that the stuff is canned
when it is not salable in its natural state.
If the canners took tomatoes, for instance, when they first came around,
at half a dollar for six, and canned them, there would be some excuse for
charging twenty-five cents for a tin thing full, but they wait until the
vines are so full of tomatoes that the producer will pay the cartage if
you will haul them away, and then the tomatoes are dipped into hot water
so the skin will drop off and they are chucked into cans that cost two
cents each, and you pay two shillings for them, when you get hungry for
tomatoes. The same way with peas, and peaches, and everything.
Did you ever try to eat canned peas? They are always old back numbers that
are as hard and tasteless as chips, and are canned after they have been
dried for seed. We bought a can of peas once for two shillings and
couldn't crack them with a nut cracker. But they were not a dead loss, as
we used them the next fall for buck shot. Actually, we shot a coon with a
charge of those peas, and he came down and struck the water, and died of
the cholera morbus the next day.
Talk of canned peaches; in the course of a brilliant career of forty years
we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the powder to
blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will split open
one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that swim around
in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a fortune.
And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money for it.
Why, for a dollar, a canning firm can buy pumpkins enough to fill all the
tin cans that they can make in a year, and yet they charge a fellow twenty
cents for a can of pumpkin, and then the canning establishment fails. It
must be that some raw pumpkin has soured on the hands of the Boston firm,
or may be, and now we thing we are on the right track to ferret out the
failure, it may be that the canning of Boston baked beans is what caused
the stoppage.
We had read of Boston baked beans since school days, and had never seen
any till four years ago, when we went to a picnic and bought a can to take
along. We knew how baked beans ought to be cooked from years of
experience, but supposed the Boston bean must hold over every other bean,
so when the can was opened and we found that every bean was separate from
every other bean, and seemed to be out on its own recognizance, and that
they were as hard as a flint, we gave them to the children to play marbles
with, and soured on Boston baked beans. Probably it was canning Boston
beans that broke up the canning establishment.