Of Roasted Chestnuts and Apples.

How long the street-trade in roasted chestnuts has been carried on I find no means of ascertaining precisely, but it is unquestionably one of the oldest of the public traffics. Before potato-cans were introduced, the sale of roasted chestnuts was far greater than it is now.

It is difficult to compute the number of roasted chestnut-sellers at present in the streets. It is probable that they outnumber 1,000, for I noticed that on a cold day almost every street fruit-seller, man or woman, had roasted chestnuts for sale.

Sometimes the chestnuts are roasted in the streets, in a huge iron apparatus, made expressly for the purpose, and capable of cooking perhaps a bushel at a time--but these are to be found solely at the street-markets.

The ordinary street apparatus for roasting chestnuts is simple. A round pan, with a few holes punched in it, costing 3d. or 4d. in a marine-store shop, has burning charcoal within it, and is surmounted by a second pan, or kind of lid, containing chestnuts, which are thus kept hot. During my inquiry, chestnuts were dear. “People don’t care,” I was told, “whether chestnuts is three and six, as they are now, or one and six a peck, as I hope they will be afore long; they wants the same pennyworths.”

Chestnuts are generally bought wholesale in Duke’s-place, on the Sunday mornings, for street sale; but some street-dealers buy them of those costermongers, whose means enable them “to lay in” a quantity. The retail customers are, for the most part, boys and girls, or a few labourers or street people. The usual price is sixteen a penny.

Roasted apples used to be vended in the streets, and often along with roasted chestnuts, but it is a trade which has now almost entirely disappeared, and its disappearance is attributed to the prevalence of potato cans.

I had the following account from a woman, apparently between sixty and seventy, though she said she was only about fifty. What she was in her youth, she said, she neither knew nor cared. At any rate she was unwilling to converse about it. I found her statement as to chestnuts corroborated:--

“The trade’s nothing to what it was, sir,” she said. “Why when the hackney coaches was in the streets, I’ve often sold 2s. worth of a night at a time, for a relish, to the hackneymen that was waiting their turn over their beer. Six and eight a penny was enough then; now people must have sixteen; though I pays 3s. a peck, and to get them at that’s a favour. I could make my good 12s. a week on roasted chestnuts and apples, and as much on other things in them days, but I’m half-starved now. There’ll never be such times again. People didn’t want to cut one another’s throats in the street business then. O, I don’t know anything about how long ago, or what year--years is nothing to me--but I only know that it was so. I got a penny a piece then for my roasted apples, and a halfpenny for sugar to them. I could live then. Roasted apples was reckoned good for the tooth-ache in them days, but, people change so, they aren’t now. I don’t know what I make now in chestnuts and apples, which is all I sells--perhaps 5s. a week. My rent’s 1s. 3d. a week. I lives on a bit of fish, or whatever I can get, and that’s all about it.”

The absolute quantity of oranges, lemons, and nuts sold annually in the London streets is as follows:

Oranges 15,400,000 Lemons 154,000 Spanish and Barcelona nuts 24,000 bushels Brazil do. 3,000 „ Chestnuts 6,500 „ Walnuts 24,000 „ Coker-nuts 400,000 nuts

OF “DRY” FRUIT SELLING IN THE STREETS.

The sellers of “dry fruit” cannot be described as a class, for, with the exception of one old couple, none that I know of confine themselves to its sale, but resort to it merely when the season prevents their dealing in “green fruit” or vegetables. I have already specified what in commerce is distinguished as “dry fruit,” but its classification among the costers is somewhat narrowed.

The dry-fruit sellers derive their supplies partly from Duke’s-place, partly from Pudding-lane, but perhaps principally from the costers concerning whom I have spoken, who buy wholesale at the markets and elsewhere, and who will “clear out a grocer,” or buy such figs, &c. as a leading tradesman will not allow to be sent, or offered, to his regular customers, although, perhaps, some of the articles are tolerably good. Or else the dry-fruit men buy a damaged lot of a broker or grocer, and pick out all that is eatable, or rather saleable.

The sale of dry fruit is unpopular among the costermongers. Despite their utmost pains, they cannot give to figs, or raisins, or currants, which may be old and stale, anything of the bloom and plumpness of good fruit, and the price of good fruit is too high for them. Moreover, if the fruit be a “damaged lot,” it is almost always discoloured, and the blemish cannot be removed.

It is impossible to give the average price of dry fruit to the costermonger. The quality and the “harvest” affect the price materially in the regular trade.

The rule which I am informed the costermonger, who sometimes “works” a barrow of dried fruit, observes, is this: he will aim at cent. per cent., and, to accomplish it, “slang” weights are not unfrequently used. The stale fruit is sold by the grocers, and the damaged fruit by the warehouses to the costers, at from a half, but much more frequently a fourth to a twentieth of its prime cost. The principal street-purchasers are boys.

A dry-fruit seller gave me the following account:--By “half profits” he meant cent. per cent., or, in other words, that the money he received for his stock was half of it cost price and half profit.

“I sell dry fruit, sir, in February and March, because I must be doing something, and green fruit’s not my money then. It’s a poor trade. I’ve sold figs at 1d. a pound,--no, sir, not slang the time I mean--and I could hardly make 1s. a day at it, though it was half profits. Our customers look at them quite particler. ‘Let’s see the other side of them figs,’ the boys’ll say, and then they’ll out with--‘I say, master, d’you see any green about me?’ Dates I can hardly get off at all, no!--not if they was as cheap as potatoes, or cheaper. I’ve been asked by women if dates was good in dumplings? I’ve sometimes said ‘yes,’ though I knew nothing at all about them. They’re foreign. I can’t say where they’re grown. Almonds and raisins goes off best with us. I don’t sell them by weight, but makes them up in ha’penny or penny lots. There’s two things, you see, and one helps off the other. Raisins is dry grapes, I’ve heard. I’ve sold grapes before they was dried, at 1d. and 2d. the pound. I didn’t do no good in any of ’em; 1s. a day on ’em was the topper, for all the half profits. I’ll not touch ’em again if I aint forced.”

There are a few costers who sell tolerable dry fruit, but not to any extent.

The old couple I have alluded to stand all the year round at the corner of a street running into a great city thoroughfare. They are supplied with their fruit, I am told, through the friendliness of a grocer who charges no profit, and sometimes makes a sacrifice for their benefit. As I was told that this old couple would not like inquiries to be made of them, I at once desisted.

There are sometimes twenty costermongers selling nothing but dry fruit, but more frequently only ten, and sometimes only five; while, perhaps, from 300 to 400 sell a few figs, &c., with other things, such as late apples, the dry fruit being then used “just as a fill up.”

According to the returns before given, the gross quantity of dry fruit disposed of yearly in the streets of London may be stated as follows:

7,000 lbs. of shell almonds, 37,800 „ raisins, 24,300 „ figs, 4,200 „ prunes.