I shall now treat of the tricks of trade practised by the London costermongers. Of these the costers speak with as little reserve and as little shame as a fine gentleman of his peccadilloes. “I’ve boiled lots of oranges,” chuckled one man, “and sold them to Irish hawkers, as wasn’t wide awake, for stunning big uns. The boiling swells the oranges and so makes ’em look finer ones, but it spoils them, for it takes out the juice. People can’t find that out though until it’s too late. I boiled the oranges only a few minutes, and three or four dozen at a time.” Oranges thus prepared will not keep, and any unfortunate Irishwoman, tricked as were my informant’s customers, is astonished to find her stock of oranges turn dark-coloured and worthless in forty-eight hours. The fruit is “cooked” in this way for Saturday night and Sunday sale--times at which the demand is the briskest. Some prick the oranges and express the juice, which they sell to the British wine-makers.
Apples cannot be dealt with like oranges, but they are mixed. A cheap red-skinned fruit, known to costers as “gawfs,” is rubbed hard, to look bright and feel soft, and is mixed with apples of a superior description. “Gawfs are sweet and sour at once,” I was told, “and fit for nothing but mixing.” Some foreign apples, from Holland and Belgium, were bought very cheap last March, at no more than 16_d._ a bushel, and on a fine morning as many as fifty boys might be seen rubbing these apples, in Hooper-street, Lambeth. “I’ve made a crown out of a bushel of ’em on a fine day,” said one sharp youth. The larger apples are rubbed sometimes with a piece of woollen cloth, or on the coat skirt, if that appendage form part of the dress of the person applying the friction, but most frequently they are rolled in the palms of the hand. The smaller apples are thrown to and fro in a sack, a lad holding each end. “I wish I knew how the shopkeepers manages _their_ fruit,” said one youth to me; “I should like to be up to some of their moves; they do manage their things so plummy.”
Cherries are capital for mixing, I was assured by practical men. They purchase three sieves of indifferent Dutch, and one sieve of good English cherries, spread the English fruit over the inferior quality, and sell them as the best. Strawberry pottles are often half cabbage leaves, a few tempting strawberries being displayed on the top of the pottle. “Topping up,” said a fruit dealer to me, “is the principal thing, and we are perfectly justified in it. You ask any coster that knows the world, and he’ll tell you that all the salesmen in the markets tops up. It’s only making the best of it.” Filberts they bake to make them look brown and ripe. Prunes they boil to give them a plumper and finer appearance. The latter trick, however, is not unusual in the shops.