MARKETS OF FROZEN FOOD.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2697, 29 November 1882, Page 4

MARKETS OF FROZEN FOOD.

It is not generally known (observes the “ Daily News”) that some millions of the human race subsist for one-third of the year on frozen food, not only meat and fish, hut also butter, game, milk, &c., reduced to the condition of blocks of ice. We do not refer to Esquimaux or Samoyedes, but to people living in the utmost affluence, who are compelled to this kind of diet as often as winter comes round. That it is not unwholesome appears from the fact that (excepting St. Petersburg) the death rate is not higher than the average of towns in France, and that the meat loses none of its flavor after months of freezing is admitted by all travellers. These are two very important considerations for us at present in England, since every week brings us cargoes of frozen meat from the antipodes, showing that we shall soon be as dependent on frozen food for a part of our yearly supply as the markets of Moscow, Quebec, Montreal, or St. Peterburg. Although we are not yet accustomed to see milk sold by the cubic foot, or Bordeaux wine in lumps like coal, or " frozen eels like walking-sticks,” these are not novelties in some other countries, and cheap freight may soon make them as common as Jersey pears or Italian chesnuts. Suffice it now to observe that frozen food is as wholesome and nutritive as unfrozen, and that it is destined to be of the highest utility in supplying the deficit between growth and consumption in such densely populated countries as England, Belgium, and Germany. The frozen markets of Russia and Canada do not depend on latitude or geographical identity, but on isothermal lines, being all below an average annual temperature of 42deg Pahr., and their winter cold ranging from zero to ISdeg. They are as follow : COMVMPTIOSr OP FItOZHH POOD, Meat. Fish, Total. Tone. Milk. &o. Tons. St. Petersburg ... 76.000 142,00 218,000 Moscow 62,000 110,000 172,0 0 Kazan 5,000 10,000 15.008 Archangel... ... 4,000 10,00'1 14,000 Irkutsk 5,000 12,000 17,000 Quebec 7,000 15,000 22,000 Montreal 12,0.0 26,000 33,000 171,000 325,000 406,000 The season begins simultaneously in Russia and Canada in the second week of December, and lasts tills till April, during which period the markets present their most showy aspect, prices are lowest, and everything is most abundant. All roads leading to St. Petersburg are crowded with sledges laden with food; swans from Finland, bear’s flesh from Olonetz, partridges from Saratoff, geese from the Don Steppes, beef from the Ukraine, grouse from Livonia, reindeer meat from Archangel, caviare from Astrakan, sheep from Orenburg, and thousands of hares from all quarters, all frozen as hard as the North Pole. The stranger who enters the Gostinnoi market place sees himself surrounded by countless rows of oxen and calves, pyramids of pigs, mountains of sheep and goats, sacks of little fish that rattle like walnuts, blocks of salmon and sturgeon or of bear’s flesh that is cut out of the snow with hatchets, sledge loads of snow-white hares frozen in a running position, with ears pointed as if escaping from the hunter, and reindeer lying down as if asleep—all await the axe or saw of the butcher, who makes no distinction of joints, but sells in blocks or slices so many inches thick. Children gather up the dust that falls * on the snow, for it is powdered meat. During the season it is usual to sell CO,OOO oxen, besides smaller cattle, and the consumption of fish is prodigious, herrings alone exceeding 30,000 tons, besides GOO tons of caviare from the Caspian. The tables of the Russian nobility, so celebrated for splendid hospitality, are never so well supplied as in the winter. The total consumption of frozen food, including the smaller markets not given above, may be summed up thus : —Beef, 130,000 tons ; ( mutton and goat, 45,000 ; pork, 33,000 ; } fish. 220,000; game, 90,000; milt, butter.

&C„ 100,000 ; total, 618,000. Canada uses altogether nearly 150,000 tons, of which meat and fish comprises two - thirds. The markets have some resemblance to the Russian, but many features of their own. Singed pigs standing upright, door from the backwoods, obelisks of cod and haddock, and piles of game and poultry from the Saskatchewan, alternate with columns of solid milk. Here, as in Russia, the frozen season is that for abundance —the farmers fattening their stock in summer, and killing it when winter has set in. We shall not be over the mark if we say that 12,000,000 of people in the Northern Hemisphere consume 1,000,000 tons of frozen food during the winter months. This does not include the frozen meat consumed in England, the quantity whereof is growing so rapidly that our annual deficit of 650,000 tons will shortly be covered in this way as the cheapest and most advantageous. Australia can easily send us 300,000 tons of mutton without reducing the capital of her flocks, and the best assurance in this regard is the fact that the prices obtained are remunerative, and that the last cargoes from Sydney and New Zealand were resold in the markets as Southdown mutton.