13. _Pine Apples_.—A great improvement may be made in keeping pine apples by twisting off their crowns, which are generally suffered to remain and to live upon the fruit till they have sucked out all the goodness. It will be very easy for fruiterers to keep a few crowns by them in water, which can be pegged or stuck on with dough, for show, when the fruit is served up, or artificial ones [p229] may be made. A pine apple will keep for a long time when its crown is removed, and will also be greatly improved in flavour, for the more aqueous parts of the fruit gradually evaporate, and leave it much more saccharine and vinous in its flavour; which natural process is totally destroyed by the vegetation of the crown, just upon the same principle that an onion or carrot loses its flavour when it begins to sprout in the spring. 14. _Mode of Condensing and Preserving Vegetable Substances for Ships’ Provision, &c._—The quantity of liquid matter which enters into the constitution of vegetables is very great; when they are deprived of it their bulk is very trifling. That preparation of animal food called _pemmican_, in which six pounds of meat are condensed into the space of one, is mainly effected by abstracting all the fluid from it. Vegetables may be treated in the same way: let them undergo the process of boiling over a fierce wood fire, so as to preserve their colour when _completely_ cooked; grind them into a complete pulp by some such means as are used to crush apples for cider, &c.; then let them be subjected to the action of the press, (being first put into hair bags, or treated as grapes are in wine countries,) till all the fluid matter is separated from them; the remainder of their substance becomes wonderfully condensed, and as hard as the _marc_ from the wine press. Then let it be rammed hard into carefully glazed air-tight jars, (or tin cases, if preferred,) and subjected to the Appertian process for preserving animal and vegetable matters, (well known, by-the-by, to our grandmothers, who preserved gooseberries in this way from time immemorial.) If jars are used, they may be sufficiently secured by having two pieces of bladder tied successively over them; when the air within is absorbed by heating the inclosed substance, their surface becomes concave by the pressure of the atmosphere, and as long as it remains in this state the matter within is safe. If it should be thought requisite to preserve the flavour of the vegetables entire, an extract should be made from the expressed liquid, and added to the _marc_. But spinage, cabbage, and many others, have abundance of flavour in them in their dry state without this addition. The preparation of the vegetable matter for use is accomplished by adding a sufficient quantity of milk, water, gravy, lime juice, &c., to the _marc_, and warming it up. Let the government, and the dealers in ships’ provision, look to this; a sufficient quantity of this _vegetable pemmican_ would be