by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, March 3, 2023.
If you wanted to bake a fruit pie during the waning days of winter in 1800, the first step would be soaking the dried fruit. Fresh fruits and vegetables were unavailable until the summer months. Local fruit in New England – apples, peaches, berries, plums, and grapes – were carefully dried during the summer months. Other methods of food preservation, salting, smoking, and pickling didn’t lend themselves well to fruit. A small amount of fruit was processed into jams and jellies, but sugar was expensive and there was no sterile canning yet. For practical purposes, dried fruit was the only game in town.