THIS FATHER OF CANNING WAS A FRENCHMAN, IMAGINE!
A world without an old tin can anywhere. Why, the tin can is as much an emblem of our country as the American eagle! Better known in many foreign lands. With its colored labels, it is found on the Sahara sands, in the Australian bush, along the edges of the Polar ice pack, and in the surf of Tierra del Fuego. The prospector in the desert and the explorer in the jungle refresh themselves by opening a can of tomatoes packed in Maryland and drinking the juice, a much better thirst-quencher than water. The thrifty European family, who could not afford fresh peaches at half a dollar each, have canned peaches from California for dessert. We think of old tin cans as rubbish, because they are to plentiful, but in treeless countries like Argentina, a hundred old tin cans make a fine wedding present with them the newly married couple can build a house. There is a story of a detacbment of Uncle Sams marines stationed in a lonely part of Cuba to protect people from bandits. One of the soldiers saw a woman washing clothes on the river bank in the Cuban way by pounding them with a rock. He made her a lovely washboard from a couple of old tin cans. Several days later the marines heard something approaching through the jungle. Bandits? They dropped out of sight, and lay snug with cocked rifles. Presently five Cuban washerwomen appeared, each with a rattling handful of tin cans. They wanted washboards too! Yet there was not a tin can in the world one hundred years ago, and very few fifty years ago (book was dated 1873). For canned food was a development of the American Civil War. The art of canning was discovered by a Frenchman, Nicolas Appert. But he did not call it canning, because he used glass jars, the tin can was to be invented later. Mother scalds and peels tomatoes out of the garden, packs and seals them in glass jars, cooks them in the wash boiler, and adds them to her stores of canned goodies on the pantry shelf. It seems very simple, but somebody must do everything the first time, and Nicolas Appert was first to preserve food by this familiar home-canning process, and got twelve thousand francs - equal to five thousand dollars today - for explaining his process in a book so anybody could use it. It was the great Napoleon who paid him the money in 1809, but Appert had been at work nearly fifteen years, with many failures and setbacks. Some great inventions have been stumbled upon by accident; but not the art of canning.
In the year 1795, France was in revolution and at war with nearly all Europe on land and sea. The French government wanted some way of supplying fresh provisions to its sailors. Nobody had ever preserved fresh vegetables or fruits before. For ages, the world had known only drying, salting, and smoking to keep meats, fish, and a few fruits from one season to another. Sailors on sea voyages had to eat salt meat and hardtack, and if the voyage was very long, grew so weak on this limited fare that ships put in at desert islands and their crews went ashore to eat wild vegetables or even grass, staying until health and strength came back. We know today that even grass contains mysterious food elements known as vitamines and that sailors could have obtained them by sprouting and eating grain. Months at sea in war vessels weakened fighting men so greatly that the French government was willing to pay a large sum of money to anybody who could find a way of supplying fresh health-giving provisions to its sailors. The successful inventor must also describe his process in a book, so France could give it to the world.
Nicolas Appert set to work to win that prize. He was forty-five years old, having been born in Châlons-sur-Marne in 1750. There was probably no man in France who had a better chance of winning, for all his life he had been handling and experimenting with food. In turn, he had been a pickler, a preserver, a wine-maker, confectioner, brewer, distiller. He had cooked food in large kitchens, stored it in great warehouses, taken contracts for supplying armies and governments.
Appert probably had little schooling, and certainly no scientific education, but he had made himself a true scientist by observation and thinking. He was poor when he began, poor through most of his long life, poor when he died, more than ninety years old, in 1841.
He had to begin at the very beginning. An Italian abbé named Spallanzani had, in 1765, heated meat extracts and other foods in closed glass flasks for an hour, and found that they kept many weeks without spoiling. But this was a scientific experiment. He believed that food was spoiled by something invisible that got into it from the air- what we now know as germs. If these invisible things were killed by heat, and the food sealed so no more could get into it from the air, it would keep. His experiments proved that he was right, and after that he went no further, nor did other scientists who repeated Spallanzanis experiments. Appert may have known about the Italian abbé's discovery, for his process of canning was worked out on the same principle. But even so, he started where the Italian scientist left off, and found a process by which nearly every kind of fresh foodfruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and even eggs and cooked dishes could be kept several years and he made that process so simple that any housewife could do the same.
His "cans" were not like the glass canning jars of today, but wide-mouthed glass bottles. He had to design these bottles to hold food, and find a way of sealing them tightly. There were no rubber rings, or screw or clamp tops. He made stoppers of cork.
They had to be cut from the best cork he could find, and also cut perfectly by hand, otherwise they would leak, and the food spoil. Special apparatus was needed to put the stoppers in tightly and wire them in place. Many of his glass bottles broke while they were being boiled, so he had to go to the glassmakers and get bottles which would stand heat. But Appert had almost limitless patience, and was a close observer, so every failure and disappointment taught him something. After he had succeeded, and samples of his preserved food put up for the French government had been carried around the world and found fresh and wholesome after two or three years, some of the greatest chemists of that day lectured to their students, explaining why he had succeeded. But without the aid of chemists, he had made his process so sound scientifically that it is the basis of our canning industry today. We use sanitary tin cans which Appert would have thought marvelous, and automatic machinery for handling food so that it is not touched by human hands, and machines for cooking and sterilizing with steam under pressure. We do everything better than Appert, yet not greatly different. For he discovered that food in air-tight packages could be sterilized with heat so it would keep, and heat is still the only thing canners use to preserve the hundreds of different food articles packed.
Heat is the great natural sterilizer, says an authority on canned foods. No preservatives, no antiseptics, no drugs, nothing but heat is used.... Nothing but heat is necessary. It is a reliable, cheap, and wholesome preservative, and no canner ever thinks of using anything else.... He would be foolish to use chemical preservatives. It would be illegal, and is prohibited by both United States and state laws. Besides, it would cost more, and be less reliable....
Appert received his prize in 1809, and with the money started a canning business that is still maintained in France by his descendants. But he died poor because he spent all the money made out of his business in experiments to improve canned foods.
His treatise was published in 1810, "The Book for All Households", or the "Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years". It was translated into English by Dr. A. W. Bitting in 1920. The inventor first describes his process so clearly that a housewife could follow it today, and gives drawings of the apparatus he used to seal his jars tightly. He also gives directions for canning many kinds of vegetables, fruit, meats, fish, soups, mushrooms, and even fresh eggs.
The original House of Appert is still putting up canned foods in Paris. It is not a large establishment, but more like a kitchen, because its chief products are fine dishes prepared by French chefs and sealed ready to serve after re-heating - jugged hare, venison cutlets, braised pheasant, roast pigeon, partridge in jelly, and chicken marengo are a few items from its bill of fare.
The autoclave, or steam retort, applied to canning, was another development of the House of Appert. During his remaining years Nicolas Appert was worried and impoverished by technical difficulties. He had only the temperature of boiling water, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which we now know was not hot enough for all foods. For months at a time his products would be excellent, and sales increase. Then, just as prosperity seemed in sight, a whole batch would spoil, perhaps in a distant place, and his profits would be swept away. His successor, M. Raymond Chevallier-Appert (born 1801, died 1892) found out what was wrong. Studying the problem, he decided that higher degrees of heat were needed in cooking. The apparatus called the autoclave, a closed vessel in which steam under pressure gave heat much greater than boiling water, had never been used for cooking food, however, and there was danger of over-cooking, because it lacked apparatus to measure and regulate the heat. Chevallier-Appert equipped the crude autoclave with another crude device, a manometer, which had been used for measuring heat in boilers. It would measure differences of only twenty degrees. He made it an instrument of precision, capable of measuring half a degree, and patented the invention in 1852. With greater heat, and an instrument to measure and control it, the difficulties of canning were overcome to such a degree that in June, 1852, Chevallier-Appert exhibited to scientists a whole sheep that had been cooked and sealed in a huge can in his autoclave four months before. M. Alfred Chevallier-Appert (born 1844, died 1909) took charge of the business on his fathers death in 1892, and his son, the present head of the house, M. Raymond Chevallier-Appert, the fourth generation of the family since Nicolas Appert himself, conducts the business to him fell the task, during the World War, of supplying rations and hospital delicacies for the French Army.
From these beginnings, the story of canning is one of constant improvement in Appert s process, chiefly by American pioneers and inventors. There is hardly a country in the world too small or far off to have canning plants. But the canning industry of the United States packs more food than all other countries together, and more different kinds of food.
There are several reasons for this. We are the greatest food-producing nation, with a wide range of climate, growing more different fruits and vegetables than any other single country. In the waters along our coasts swim the greatest variety of fish and shellfish. In our great meat-packing plants many dainties are prepared, ready for the table. Then, where canning in other countries is done chiefly by hand, we have applied machinery to all its processes some of the most remarkable machinery that automatically makes the cans, peels the peaches, shells the peas, catches and cleans the fish, and puts them into cans, ready to go around the world, without ever being touched by human hands.
Again, we Americans live well, so we eat the commoner and cheaper canned foods abundantly, for variety in our diet, and can afford the more expensive luxuries.
Finally, canned foods fit into our living habits. In our great cities and factory towns people havent much space to keep fresh food supplies, and are often too busy to cook. So they let the canner cook for them, buying their vegetables and fruits ready for heating, along with many ready-cooked dishes that come in cans.
Suppose you were the steward of a great city hotel. Tons of food to he prepared, cooked, and served every day in a few hours, by well-paid workers, in kitchens where space is costly. By using canned foods, much of the washing, peeling, pitting, slicing, and cooking is avoided - transferred to canning plants in country neighborhoods where rent and wages are lower. As a hotel steward you would learn that some canned foods are better than fresh. Canned asparagus is better than nine-tenths of the fresh asparagus sold in markets, and is never out of season. Canned spinach is cleaner than most fresh spinach.
The first real business success in canning was made by Englishmen. For, while the process had been invented by a Frenchman, there was war between France and England, and in working to defeat Napoleon the English had driven French commerce from the ocean and were building a great commerce of their own. The English had the ships and the customers for world trade, and English dainties in sealed glass bottles became so well known between 1810 and 1825 that people would have no other.
The first canner who began putting up preserved foods in the United States had to use a London label on his products. This first American canner was an Englishman, William Underwood. Born in 1787, he served an apprenticeship at the trade of pickling and preserving in London, and when thirty years old came to the United States, landing in New Orleans in 1817, believing that there were opportunities for putting up food by Appert's process. New Orleans was not the right place, and in 1819 he reached Boston, having walked nearly the whole way. In 1821, he had a canning plant and was shipping fruits and berries in glass to South America and the Orient. For people at home would not buy his stuff they thought only the imported was good, though it cost much more. Even to sell in foreign markets, Underwood had to put the magic word London on his labels - sell for less than English canners asked, and take his pay in sugar or hemp. Most of his glass bottles had to be brought from England, and more than once poor bottles spoiled his whole seasons output. But his business prospered. He put up fruits for pie-making, and was the first man in this country to can tomatoes. Underwood was also the first to put up lobsters, and a pioneer in using tin instead of glass.
The next pioneer was also English by birth - Thomas Kensett, who about 1825, in New York, was packing fruit and some vegetables. His father-in-law, Ezra Daggett, an Englishman, had previously put up canned oysters in New York. There is a tradition that Kensett canned oysters, lobsters, and salmon as early as 1819, before Underwood began canning in Boston. It is also believed that either himself or Daggett re-invented Appert's process without knowing anything about the Frenchman's work, and that Kensett applied for a United States patent on a process for preserving animal, vegetable and other perishable foods. The application is said to have been considered a hoax by patent officials, and remained ten years in the Patent Office without action. Kensett was also a pioneer in developing the tin can, and is said to have worked with Peter Durand, its inventor.
But Thomas Kensett did one real pioneering job about which there is no doubthe saw the great advantages of Chespeake Bay as a canning center, and moved to Baltimore.
In the waters of the Bay, there were abundant oysters, crabs, and fish. Around its shores grew peaches, apples, plums, berries, and other fruits for canning. It had an ideal climate for tomatoes. All the work of gathering, washing, shelling, peeling, and filling and cooking in the first crude canning plants was done by hand. So a great many workers were needed in the canning season. Baltimore had plenty of them, and was convenient for receiving fresh sea food, fruit, and vegetables, and for shipping them to other sections of the country after canning. It quicky became the world's greatest canning center, full of energy and enterprise, with men fertile in invention. When the Civil War brought the first real popular demand for canned foods, Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay region prospered, for they were right on the borders of the war zone.
Oyster canning began in Baltimore about 1840, and the following year sardine canning was begun in Eastport, Maine. Oysters and sea food were the first products that became popular. Inland cities could get fresh Baltimore oysters packed in ice through the winter; but folks in smaller places seldom enjoyed such a luxury - the countryman's greatest treat when he went to town was an oyster stew. Baltimore and Boston canned oysters so they would keep for months, and could be bought at any country grocery store by people who had never eaten a fresh oyster.
Small canneries quickly sprang up all along the Atlantic Coast. For on the seaboard the canner could pack oysters, lobsters, crabs, and fish at certain seasons of the year, and put up fruit and vegetables at other seasons, thus keeping his factory running as many months in the year as possible - one of the greatest problems in canning everywhere.
For twenty years, from 1840 to 1860, these seaboard canners struggled against many difficulties. They were without scientific knowledge of principles that make present-day canning a science. Each canner had his own secret methods, or employed a processor who worked in a tightly locked room keeping his methods secret from the proprietor. The whole seasons pack often spoiled, though processed in ways that had been successful other seasons, and such a disaster could only be attributed to bad luck. The tin can was still crudely made by hand, and expensive and undependable. Tinsmiths who sealed food in the cans-cappers as they were called - became as overbearing as the processor, and if their demands for unreasonable wages were not met, walked out of the cannery, leaving the days work to spoil. Processing was still done with boiling water, as Appert had done it, and took five or six hours, so even the best canners were limited to two or three thousand cans a day.
Probably the greatest difficulty of all was that people would not buy canned food freely. It was regarded either with suspicion or as a luxury. Prices were generally high. In the eighteen-fifties a small can of oysters, salmon, lobsters, tomatoes, corn, or peas cost about fifty cents in the grocery store.
There were some remarkable inventions during this time, among others the successful canning of milk by Gail Borden, who took out his patent in 1856, the beginning of fruit canning in California during the fifties after the discovery of gold, and of salmon canning in the Pacific Northwest. But these were years of growing pains. During the next ten years, from 1861 into the seventies, the infant industry was to be suddenly adopted by the public, sent to school and begin to really grow up.
HOW AMERICA MADE CANNING ITS OWN
Every American farmer has an automobile, and farmers in other countries think it wonderful. Every American family has a phonograph, and that is marvelous to foreigners.
It is a quiet marvel, too, that once a day the American dinner table should have a can of Maryland tomatoes, Maine corn, Alaska salmon, California peaches, or New York State evaporated milk. For they are all products of the same American knack of invention, of doing things in a big way by machinery, our quantity production.
Other countries have canneries and put up excellent tinned foods. But in nearly all other countries canning is done with a great deal of hand work. The cans are often made by hand; the vegetables and fruits are cleaned and sorted and put into the cans by hand; and many tasks which we turn over to machines are done by women and girls. Canned foods, as other countries understand them, are luxuries for well-to-do families, while in the United States they are everyday food for everybody.
Canning gives the American family - especially in cities and factory towns - a kitchen garden where all good things grow, and where it is always harvest time. There are more tomatoes in a ten-cent can than could be bought fresh in city markets for that sum when tomatoes are at their cheapest, and this is true of most other tinned foods. A regular Arabian Nights garden, where raspberries, apricots, olives, and pineapples, always ripe, grow side by side with peas, pumpkins, spinach; a garden with baked bean vines, and spaghetti hushes, and sauerkraut beds, and great cauldrons of hot soup, and through it running a branch of the ocean in which one can catch salmon, lobsters, crabs and shrimp, and dig oysters and clams.
Canning was a small business until the Civil War. Most of the work was done by hand. Canned foods were more costly than today, and not so many people could afford them.
When the Civil War began in 1861, Lincoln called hundreds of thousands of Northern troops into the field. This sudden shifting of men from their Northern homes to Southern States where little food was grown, called for everything imaginable that could be easily transported. Food resources were taxed, and in their efforts to supply the demand, army contractors turned to canned foods. In a very few weeks an unlimited demand was created for the very small supply.
How many cans of food were being put up yearly at the beginning of the Civil War is not known. Probably five million cans of everything, because in 1870, after war growth, the output had reached thirty million cans. We eat nearly that many cans of sauerkraut yearly, and more cans of cherries!
The overwhelming Civil War demand found canners still processing food by boiling, in factories that could turn out only two or three thousand cans a day. Some way had to be found to speed up the industry, and the first invention was a method of making boiling water give more heat. As early as 1808 Sir Humphry Davy, the eminent English chemist, had found that when calcium chloride was added to boiling water its temperature could be increased to 240 degrees or more. A Baltimore canner named Isaac Solomon is credited with applying this discovery to the processing of canned goods in 1861. At a stroke the time necessary for boiling the cans was reduced from five or six hours to half an hour, on the average; so a canner with kettles that would turn out 1,000 cans in the old way suddenly had a capacity of 10,000 cans. It was also found that the temperature of boiling water could be increased by adding common salt. Cooking the cans in boiling oil was still another way of securing higher degrees of heat.
When people hear that canned foods are processed they often think that some sort of chemical or preservative is put into the can itself. That is a mistake. The canner uses nothing but heat, but he has found ways to get higher degrees of heat: first by putting chemicals in the water, and later by steam and pressure. Steam is most widely used for processing today.
The Civil War gave thousands of people their first taste of canned foods. Soldiers ate them in army camps, sailors on Uncle Sams gunboats, and the wounded and sick in hospitals. Going back home, they told others about canned foods, and bought them. Gail Borden's condensed milk in cans was especially popular- factories could not be built fast enough to supply customers, and Borden made a fortune - after ten years of experiment and discouragement. Canneries were started inland for the first time, at Cincinnati, Indianapolis and other places. As long as demand was small the canner had stayed near the ocean, where he could put up oysters, lobsters, and other sea food in certain seasons, and fruit and vegetables in others. But now there was such a demand that he could go inland and pack fruits and vegetables alone.
While many new canneries were established during the Civil War, the only great improvement was the use of chemicals to get higher temperatures for processing. Most of the washing, peeling, and preparing of foods and putting them in the cans was done by hand. When peace came in 1865, however, canners began to develop machinery, and the next fifteen years were very busy and interesting times. Let us live through that period with an energetic canner named Louis McMurray, the pioneer and leader in his day, as William Underwood and Thomas Kensett were fifty years before: Born in Indiana in 1823, McMurray's family moved to Baltimore when he was nine years old. In 1851, while still in his twenties, he commenced packing hermetically sealed oysters and Maryland fruit. He knew little about canning, but believed that canned foods would soon be used in every household, and that fortunes would be made by canners. So he meant to make his fortune. His first products were sent to New Orleans and sold at such fine prices that he already saw millions in his venture. But alas! his products didn't keep, and there were losses to pay, and difficulties to straighten out with customers. Like other canners then, he used the boiling process, which was satisfactory for fruits and acid vegetables like tomatoes, but did not suffice to keep oysters, peas and the like. When the device of using calcium chloride was hit upon, he adopted it, and succeeded in shipping his products to all parts of the world, and established a cannery in Baltimore, employing one thousand people during the busy season. Before that, in 1858, he had found a way to open oysters quickly by scalding them instead of by hand. In 1862, Henry Evans did it even more quickly by steam, twenty bushels at a time in a steam chest.
McMurray was one of the first canners to take the cannery close to the fresh-food supplies, improving quality by getting them into the cam with the least delay. Every good canner does that now; but in his day most of the canneries were located Kin cities, and the farmer and fisherman brought stuff to their doors, sometimes several days after harvesting. A wonderful demand for canned oysters sprang up after the war, both at home and abroad. McMurray and his partner, Thomas H. Smith, bought a large steamboat, fitted it up as a floating cannery and boarding house, and went down Chesapeake Bay, into the Rappahannock River, anchoring right among the oyster beds. As no oysters had been taken from that spot during the four years of war, they lay two or three feet thick. Oyster tonguers lived on the boat, and brought the fresh oysters to it in small boats. A canning crew on the boat shelled and canned the oysters, and when the season ended the steamer put back to Baltimore with a cargo of cove oysters ready for the market. A few months later McMurray and Smith would be busy canning fruit at their Baltimore plant.
In 1868, the Maryland peach crop failed. Undaunted, they shipped their apparatus to Cincinnati, where there were plenty of peaches. They took can-makers and other skilled workers along, rented a factory, and turned disaster into success, and were the first canners to leave the seaboard and go inland.
While he was in Cincinnati, McMurray ate some real sugar corn. In their Baltimore cannery they put up canned corn; but it was field corn, not the delicious sweet sugar corn of the garden. McMurray had an idea: Why not raise sugar corn in the Maryland mountain country, where the climate was cool? Others declared the idea foolish, but he and Smith went ahead, building a mountain cannery in Frederick, Maryland. When they asked farmers to plant several hundred acres of sugar corn, one farmer said: Why, that is more than the people in Frederick could eat in a lifetime! Contracts were made with farmers to raise the corn at forty dollars an acre. But even then farmers were so skeptical that they neglected the crop after it was planted, and very little corn was brought to the cannery. A single wagon-load was one farmers whole crop from forty acres, but he insisted upon being paid in full-$1,600 for a wagon-load of corn! To refuse meant that no farmer would raise corn for them thereafter, and the cannery would he ruined. They lost $20,000 the first year, but McMurray was not daunted. He decided to turn farmer and raise his own corn, and did so.
Then something happened that made McMurray a leader in the next important canning development - that of the machine - made can and the use of machinery generally. Cans were still made and sealed by hand. In 1870 the men who sealed the filled cans in McMurrays corn cannery wanted to go back to Baltimore, though they had agreed to stay through the corn-packing season. All right, go! he said, and at once invented and patented capping steels and a furnace with which a boy could seal twice as many cans as a skilled tinsmith working with the old-fashioned capping iron. As machines for cutting corn and doing other work automatically were invented, McMurray adopted them, and his mountain corn cannery became a center for ideas, and a place from which assistants went out to establish canneries through the Western and Southern States. He made a syrup from the stalks of sugar corn; grew mushrooms and canned them; bought cattle and fattened them on corn husks and corn cobs during the canning season; ran a box factory, can-making factory, fertilizer mill, blacksmith shop, machine shop, carpenter shop, and other enterprises. He was also the financial backer of Welcolm Sprague, who in the early eighties invented a continuous chain-feed machine for cutting sugar corn off the cob. With these machines McMurray was able to pack 200,000 cans of corn a day, and he helped Sprague build a factory to make them. When McMurray died, in 1888, he was worth more than a million dollars, all made in the canning industry from small beginnings, and he owned so many thousand acres of land around his mountain-corn cannery that it was necessary to hire the county fair grounds and hold a two-weeks sale to dispose of his realty. His partner, Thomas H. Smith, with whom he had a quarrel in the eighties, afterwards established canning factories in thirty Western and Southern States, and died in 1908.
It was during the period of McMurrays busy life that inventors made canning a great American industry, working along the two general lines of better processing and automatic machinery. The tin can itself was also improved; but that is a separate story.
As long as canners processed their products in boiling water there was a spirit of friendliness and teamwork among them. Nobody had any advanages, for boiling water could never be brought above the temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. One canner might boil his corn or peas longer than another; but the best way of doing it was as freely discussed as cooking recipes by housewives. When Isaac Solomon found, however, that the temperature of boiling water could be raised by adding calcium chloride, processing suddenly became a secret and a mystery. If one canner found a better way, he kept it to himself. If an employee who did this work was observant and intelligent, he might find a better way to process corn, peas, or lobster, using a certain temperature for a certain time. Instead of telling his employer about the discovery, he kept it a personal secret and a mystery. Locked in a room with his kettles and thermometer, he allowed nobody to watch him. He was eternally on the look-out for spies, and would talk only through a wicket, even to his employer. The latter was under his domination, for he didnt know the processers secrets, and if the latter were offended he might quit work. The processer imparted his secrets only to his sons or relatives.
Just the sort of situation that stimulates invention, and in 1874, after a reign of thirteen years, the autocratic processer was tumbled off his throne. After much patient experiment, A. K. Shriver, a Baltimore canner, perfected and patented an autoclave, or closed kettle in which processing was done with live steam or superheated water. His experiments were kept so secret that nobody knew about the Shriver kettle until he was ready to patent it, in 1874. Picture the consternation of the processer! or there was no more mystery about this part of a cannery. The Shriver kettle gave still higher degrees of heat, so that canned foods could be processed in less time, and with less danger of spoiling. It also shortened the time needed for processing. Canned foods were put up so quickly that it was difficult to wash, peel, slice, and prepare the fruits, vegetables and other materials fast enough to keep pace with it, and inventors were spurred on to devise automatic machinery for those tasks.
About the same year another inventor, John Fisher, developed a method of processing in a kettle with dry or superheated steam, which gives still higher temperatures. Yet another way of securing high temperature was devised in a very strong closed chamber of steel in which the cooking is done by steam pressure.
It will be remembered that the autoclave was adapted to canning as early as 1852 in France by M. Raymond Chevallier-Appert, as told in the previous chapter, but M. Chevallier-Apperts improved auto clave with the manometer or pressure gauge, for measuring and controlling the heat, was apparently not known in the United States, or Shriver and Fisher developed its principle in new inventions of their own.
These inventions give the canner all the heat he needs, and more - twice the boiling point of water, more than 500 degrees if he wants it, although he seldom needs more than 260 degrees Fahrenheit, and that for but few foods.
And still canned foods sometimes spoiled. Not so often as before; but for several years the canner might pack the most difficult things, like peas and corn, without trouble, and then hear that some of his product had spoiled on the grocers shelves. By giving him plenty of heat, the inventor had overcome most of the difficulties - but not all. Now he needed the help of the bacteriologist, although for quite a while he tried to solve the riddle himself. Heat was still used largely by rule of thumb. The canner, having learned that corn or peas would keep if he processed them so many minutes or hours at such-and-such a temperature, and then finding spoilage, suspected that it was caused by something in the water he used, or in the tin can, or what not. But in the first years of the twentieth century, canners began coming together to discuss their business and their problems. In 1907 the National Canner's Association was formed, and scientists were asked to study this problem of spoilage.
They found that it was a germ problem, like so many of our troubles in modern life. Before Pasteur discovered that fermentation, souring, decay, with many of the diseases of humans, animals, and plants, are caused by these minute organisms that float in the air, canners were pretty much at sea. Appert and those who followed him knew that heat did something to fresh food that kept it from spoiling as long as it was tightly sealed. Knowing nothing of germs, they thought the food kept because heat drove air out of the canand sealing kept air from getting in. They would have been astonished if some good fairy had whisked them into a chemists laboratory today and had the chemist show them that pure air contains nothing which will spoil food. To prove this, the chemist would simply heat common air so that every particle of germ life in it is destroyed, and then open perfectly sterilized canned foods, and keep them in that air after it had cooled, and the food would keep fresh indefinitely.
When scientists studied this last baffling puzzle of spoilage, they found that there are germs with great power to resist heat, and they may get into fresh fruit, vegetables, and other foods, causing trouble. When a canner successfully puts up peas or corn year after year, using a certain time and temperature in processing, he is packing fresh peas and corn free from these heat-resisting bacteria. When trouble comes, it means that the heat-resisting bacteria have gotten into his raw material, sometimes from the air when damp warm weather favored their growth, and sometimes from pests that attacked the growing plants. For example, a certain fungus pest in tomato plants makes canned tomatoes of such poor quality that they cannot be sold under our Federal pure food law. To get tomatoes free from that pest it was necessary to breed tomato plants so vigorous that it could not attack them.
The canner now has enough heat at his command to kill the most sfubborn germs, and bacteriologists have found out what sorts of food these germs attack, and how much heat is needed to destroy them.
This coupling together of food and germs may not seem very wholesome; but really it has been a fine thing for canned foods. Long ago canners learned that freshness and cleanliness were absolutely necessary to the packing of good products. The bacteriologist and chemist have shown them how to be still more clean with the scientific cleanliness of the laboratory.
Much credit for scientific progress in the canning industry is due to Dr. W. D. Bigelow, Director of the research laboratories of the National Canners Association, and his assistants; also to Dr. and Mrs. A. W. Bitting, Director of Research of the Glass Containers Association, and formerly in charge of the technological work of these other laboratories; and to the far-sighted canners who were instrumental in organizing the research department of this association, and setting the scientific men at work upon their technical problems.
The machinery used in canning divides into several groups. There are machines for making the cans themselves. Some canners make their own cans, while others buy them of can-making companies; but these machines are common to the whole industry. There are machines for processing, also used by the whole industry. In the preparation of different food articles for canning, however, each branch of the industry has developed special machinery for its own particular needs. In the salmon cannery it is the wonderful iron chink, or automatic device for cleaning and trimming the fish - so called because this work was once done by Chinamen. In the canning of peas it is a marvelous series of machinesa line, as the canner calls it - for shelling, cleaning, and grading green peas, more machinery being needed for this vegetable than any other canned food. In corn, there is special machinery for husking the ears, freeing them of silk, and cutting the corn off the cob. In tomato canning there are machines for washing, scalding, peeling, and filling the cans. A good many of the washing, peeling, slicing, and other devices used in preparing foodstuffs for the cans are used for more than one fruit or vegetable. Finally, when the cans are filled, there is machinery to seal the tops, carry the cans to the processing device, put on the labels, and so forth - these are machines common to the whole industry, too; but made in different sizes and forms to handle different kinds of cans - the tiny single portion of baked beans, the gallon can of apples put up for pie making, the flat sardine can, tall round salmon can, fat round tomato can, and square and tapering tins for meat.
The best way to get an idea of all this machinery is to see it in the different kinds of canneries; so it will lie dealt with in chapters devoted to the packing of tomatoes, corn, peas, salmon, pineapple, and so forth. But there is an interesting story in the difficulties canners had to overcome when labor-saving machinery was introduced.
The processer was not the only despot in the cannery when most of the work was still done by hand. Men who made the cans and soldered on the tops after they had been filled, and the women and girls who prepared the fruit, vegetables, and other foods, and put them in cans, bitterly fought every machine that threatened their employment. War was declared on the iron slaves, as machines were called. They were boycotted, damaged, destroyed. Baltimore was the chief canning center then, in the seventies and eighties, and it became the chief battleground. If a tomato canner introduced a machine for filling cans, his can-makers, or the cappers, who put the tops on the filled cans, might leave him, and he would be compelled to shut down his factory, and hundreds of acres of tomatoes rotted unpicked a loss to the farmers, the canner, and the public. Bit by bit, however, machinery made head- way, at first rather small and simple devices, operated by footpower. For inventors were exploring new fields, and in more than one case had to guard their inventions against damage while showing a canner that they would do a certain job more quickly and cheaply than hand workers. Labor-saving machinery has been fought by hand workers ever since the first machines were invented; but the automatic machine always wins in such a contest, and in the end it creates more work, because it cheapens products and brings them within the reach of more people, so the output is greatly increased. The iron slaves won in this case. But the human workers won too. For when the twenty-year battle ended, about 1890, there were fifty thousand employed in our canneries, against less than six thousand in 1870.
From that day on American canning has been a machine industry, its automatic devices constantly growing in number, capacity, and ingenuity. And an industry most hospitable to the inventor, because the canner always thinks, What kind of a machine do I need for this job? We will see more of this when we come to salmon, a canned food which must be packed in a few short weeks with automatic machinery which has been brought to the highest development, and in the story of Hawaiian pineapple, a food product created by the American canner and his machinery on a tropical island in the Pacific.
Canned foods are today one of the most important items in the grocers stock, making up nearly one tenth of all his sales - at least in big cities, where people living in apartments, and with little time for cooking, use these convenient products. In New York City, it has been learned, condensed and evaporated milk lead with nearly three per cent (2.9 per cent). Then salmon, sardines and other canned sea foods (1.6 per cent), followed by tomatoes (1.3 per cent), peas (8 per cent), canned soups (8.7 per cent), canned fruit (8 per cent), beans (7 per cent), corn (4 per cent), and other canned goods (4 per cent).
By James H. Collins (1873) in "The Story of Canned Foods", E. P. Dutton & Company, New York, 1924 edition, excerpts pp.1-29. Typed, adapted and illustrated do be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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