You often hear in history how fruits such as pineapples and bananas (seen as an exotic foreign produce in places such as Britain) were transported back to the country for people, often wealthy or influential, to try. How did such fruits last the months long voyages from colonies back to the empire’s capital without modern day refrigeration/freezing?
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very uncommon during the 1700s, it would be grown in hothouse (greenhouses basically) from seed or wrapped unripen in stem wraps made from leaves. (like banana leaves).
Later on it was a mix of salt an large blocks of ice which take a long time to melt, inside sealed hulls on ships.
And finnslt commercial refrigerstion was commercially adopted by the late 1800s.
Bananas for example don’t require refrigeration or freezing and those deteriorate the fruit. The trick is picking them way before they are ripe and then you have quite a bit of time to transport them. Grocery store fruit and vegetables are still managed this way. Which is why garden/local grown are quite a bit better tasting. There are also quite a bit of varieties that don’t travel well but taste better that you would never find in a grocery store.
Bananas taste much better ripened off a banana tree. You can often find green bananas in a grocery store which again were picked quite a bit before ripening.
Edit for grammar 🙁
It depends. Very often, they simply did not.
There is a legend that Queen Victoria offered a bounty of 100 pounds sterling to anyone who could bring her a fresh mangosteen. They don’t keep long.
In most cases, fruit itself was not brought back to Europe. What was brought back were plants, seeds or cuttings which they tried to plant on European soil. An interesting example is peaches, which are native to China. They were first introduced to Europe in Ancient Greece, via land trade. But they were in turn introduced to North America by colonists, supposedly by George Minifie who brought the seeds and planted them on his estate.
In the case of pineapple, it was a little easier because the journey from the Americas (John Adams sailed to France in six weeks in 1777) is significantly shorter than the voyage from Asia. Columbus supposedly managed to bring one back to Spain. But even then, most of the fruit would rot on the journey, and what were sold were the ones that did not. This made an unspoiled pineapple incredibly expensive. Rich people would buy one, display it at parties, and never eat it until it rotted. But by the 1700s greenhouse technology allowed tropical fruit to be cultivated in Europe though still at considerable expense.
This is a broad question and it’s important to note just which fruit you’re referring to, which trade route and which time period.
That being said a general answer is that exotic fruit was very expensive because of that reason. Trips at sea would take months or even years because this was more efficient and profitable for ship owners. For many shipments of goods procured from far away, there wasn’t a time limit. The order was “leave and return with a full hold” of whatever they were going out to get. If a ship was operating under a time limit trips on known trade routes, that is routes that had been charted and the crew had experience with, as opposed with exploratory expeditions of uncharted waters, transit times were not as long as people think. Crossing the Atlantic for example could be done in about a month, give or take a few days depending on the ship or how good the weather was. In general though if fresh exotic fruit became available far away, say in Europe, it was usually either because they were able to cultivate them in Europe, bringing just seeds from the region of origin, or because they could at least be cultivated somewhere closer, like in the middle east or Africa.
A prominent example of just how expensive fruit could be is the pineapple, which for a time was brought over just as a status symbol and not to be consumed. It was considered a huge flex for nobles to display a pineapple in their home during banquets or other functions, and they didn’t actually eat it, they just held onto it until it rotted.
There’s another very interesting story which I unfortunately remember very little of so I apologise in advance but I do remember hearing a story of a roman general/politician who presented a fresh orange/apple to the senate and proclaimed that just three days ago this fruit was picked from across the empire. I don’t even remember why he did it, I thought it was to emphasise the danger posed by enemies at the edges of the empire, but unfortunately I really don’t remember details.
If they were shipping ice from Boston to Australia prior to 1851, I am sure they shipped it to other tropical countries and could use it to ship fruit to Europe.
When the Transcontinental Railway was completed in the 1860s they used “Icebox Cars” to ship fruit from California to at least Chicago.
Fun topic! They put them in tin cans. It’s one of the first modern preservation methods for fruit and worked for overseas production very well. You’d grow fruits on plantations and build a cannery in the harbor. Fresh fruit would either get put in sugar or pasteurised and put in a tin can to be shipped across the sea. It was much easier to do then refrigeration and retained more of the original fruit character then drying the fruits, which was a more low tech alternative.
I love the story of pineapples in Britain. Back in those days, a pineapple was a luxury article, pretty much like an Aston Martin nowadays, and extremely rich people who would have a pineapple would show it around.
https://theconversation.com/forget-fast-cars-and-shiny-rolexes-rich-people-used-to-show-off-their-wealth-with-pineapples-and-celery-124662
They pickled a lot of food and vegetables, enough so that mangoes became the word for pickled fruits and vegetables in parts of the Americas for a while, lasting into the 20th c in Indiana as the word for bell peppers.
They didn’t. For example, tomatoes 🍅 native from the Americas would arrived yellow to Italy, people thought tomatoes were of a golden/yellowish color originally. Because of this, the italian word for tomato became “pomodoro” meaning “golden apple” or “golden fruit”.
I have a tangentially related fun fact. Terrariums were invented expressly for this purpose in the 1800s so that British explorers could ship living exotic plants back home while keeping them in their native humidity/temperature. Nowadays they’re mostly decorative, but they used to be plant life support units.
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