Fruit

The Arrival of Exotic Fruits in Britain

An introduction to Britain’s exotic fruit imports, the development of canning, and cooling and refrigeration

Even though British cuisine holds the great joke that it lacks diversity, during the Victorian era, British cuisine experienced a considerable advancement and diversification as many new ingredients became available, such as exotic fruits.

Before the Industrial Revolution

Before the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, Britain was largely a rural society and Briton’s diets were limited to foods that could be grown on British soil, such as apples and potatoes. However, that is not to say Britain didn’t receive any imports. Because of Britain’s amount of colonies, she became one of the strongest maritime forces and was able to import small quantities of fresh fruit albeit if only some of this was edible after the long journey.

By 1850, the British Empire had its influence in virtually all parts of the world, Britain’s population was ever growing and the Industrial Revolution was well underway. By the 1850s, wages also rose amongst the working and middle classes which introduced a widening of their dietary habits and a demand for different kinds of foods not native to Britain and a surge in foreign food imports.

Different fruits soon became heavily in demand and increased further during the Christmas period as dried fruits such as currents and raisins grew more popular. Although fresh fruits were more difficult to transport than dried fruits, the imports of oranges and lemons were made possible as they had a longer shelf life than other fresh fruits such as bananas.

“food imports up to the nineteenth century had always been limited to foods such as dried fruits and spices, which could travel distances without spoilage; the problem with other foods was how to keep them free of harmful bacteria”

– Colin Spencer, British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History

As seen to the left, fresh fruits imported during the early nineteenth century were not even listed under their own category, instead, whichever exotic fruits that survived the journey across the ocean were listed as "unenumerated fruits". The few fruits successfully imported were then sold to the only people who could afford to pay the high prices, the elite and royalty.

The Relationship Between Maritime Developments and Diversifying British cuisine.

For the majority of the nineteenth century, sailing ships which were designed to be light and quick were used on routes from Spain, the Mediterranean and the West Indies. However, because of their small carrying capacity, a new type of ship emerged; the coal-driven steamer. These soon replaced sailing ships as steamers were much quicker.

Despite these maritime developments, transporting fresh fruit remained difficult and its imports were limited compared to other items that were also imported. For example, in 1840, there were virtually no imports of meat, but by 1887, it increased to around 700,000 tons. Fresh fruit, like bananas, on the other hand, remained for many years at the same levels as before. This is because demand was small and prices were high. So, although the London market was provided with the occasional fruity luxuries, it lacked the quantity to make fresh fruit imports a worthwhile business.

The Development of Canning

Today, it’s hard to imagine life without cans of baked beans, tuna or assorted fruit soaked in syrup in our cupboards. However, canned food is a relatively new method of food preservation, dating only from the mid-1850s!

In 1804, Nicolas Appert, a Parisian confectioner "discovered that he could preserve food by putting fresh food in glass jars, standing the jars in hot water to expel air and then hermetically sealing them with alternate layers of cork and wax.” A discovery that would drastically change world trade and the kinds of food members of the middle classes were eating. This is because the Victorian era saw the introduction of long-life products such as condensed milk, dried eggs, bottled sauces, meats, and canned and preserved fruits including jams and tinned pineapple.

Did you know:

By the 1870s, almost every middle-class kitchen had a tin opener!

Cooling and Refrigeration

It took almost a century since the first attempts at refrigeration were made by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow in 1756 until refrigeration began to be used for transporting meat products into Britain from places such as Argentina, before being used to transport exotic fruits.

Up to this point, attempts to carry tropical fruits were regularly made by merchants, but the reliability of transporting exotic fruits across the ocean was limited by the pace of ripening and the lack of efficiency in early transportation methods. Yet, this all changed with the developments in refrigeration as this delayed the natural ripening process of foods, meaning exotic fresh fruit could at long last arrive in Britain in an edible condition.

Many new origins of overseas fruits and vegetables such as the Canary Islands were also found as a result of improved maritime technology. This allowed for the island's exports, especially from Madeira who previously couldn't commercially export its fruit products, to adopt the banana industry which boomed as seen in the table below:

Changing British Cuisine

Throughout the 1890s this advancement in cooling technologies caused a second wave of imports of tropical fruits.

For example, in Mrs. Beeton’s Cookery Book of 1864, there were in total of forty recipes that included ingredients that had to be imported from abroad, but these were all citrus fruits. There is no mention of bananas or pineapples, however, around 30 years later, in Cassel’s New Universal Cookery Book, several recipes feature exotic fruits including, bananas and mangoes. Mangoes, appeared in multiple recipes for fruit salads, chutney and pickles, while Mrs Beeton's featured fruits that were largely grown in Britain for recipes such as an Apple Charlotte.

From this, it's fair to say that cooling technology had a huge impact on the importation of tropical, exotic fruits in Britain and brought with it the vast diversification of the British diet not only for the late Victorians but also for us today.