Many women make a comfortable living by utilizing their inherited or
acquired knowledge of the kind of flavoring that will make certain
cakes and candies sell briskly. Along these lines there are unlimited
opportunities for commercial gain.
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.