THE HISTORY OF CANNING

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The Berthold-Weiss Factory, one of the first large canned food factories in Csepel, Budapest (1885)

Canning is a method of preserving food in which food is processed and sealed in airtight container and then sterilized by heat. The process was invented after prolonged research by Nicolas Appert of France in 1809, in response to a call by his government for a means of preserving food for army and navy use. Canning revolutionized kitchen work and menu preparation by simplifying the heavy job of preserving foods, previously accomplished by salting, drying, smoking, or pickling—all chores that date to the earliest eras of domesticity. A forerunner of the tin can was a variety of sealable glass and crockery vessels that contained preserved foods such as sauerkraut, pickled eggs, gherkins, or brandied fruit. An ingenious in vitro preservation method influenced Thomas Saddington, who earned the London Society of Arts award in 1807 for preserving fruit for home and galley.

Appert’s Contribution

The real breakthrough in 1809 followed the work of the French inventor Nicolas Appert, whose extensive experiments in food preservation produced the first sterilized food in its own glass container, which he prepared for the French military. The simplicity of Appert’s approach made it suitable even for the average housewife. As explained in the Journal de Paris, “henceforth, everybody will be able to preserve the treasures nature bestows on us in one season and enjoy them in the sterile season when she refuses them.” (Schärer & Fenton 1998, 204) About the time that an English patent extended canning to glass, pottery, and tin containers, Appert published a handbook on canning for the home cook. Because of the tedious nature of the sterilization method, however, few homemakers bought his brochure. In 1812, the journalist and food writer Grimod de la Reynière surmised that canning required such skill, patience, and experience that few home cooks felt equal to the task. Perhaps because of time and labor constraints on housewives and doubts about the sturdiness and transportability of glass containers, Appert’s concept of home sterilization in jars failed to take hold in France until Louis Pasteur popularized it in 1861 by explaining how boiling killed the microbes that caused food to spoil.

For the food industry, canning was an economic boon—a method of extending the value of farm produce. In 1810, the English engineer Peter Durand received a royal patent from King George III for the invention of the cylindrical sealed can. His method required cutting cans from tin-plated sheet metal with foot-powered shears, then forming the body around a cylindrical mold and soldering the seams. Two years later, an English foundryman, Bryan Donkin (or Dorkin), and John Hall of the Dartford Iron Works used Appert’s method to preserve meat, vegetables, and soup in tins and established the first commercial cannery. They claimed to have paid £1,000 for the use of Appert’s patent. They offered boiled beef and mutton, boiled veal, corned round of beef, mess beef, mess beef and vegetables, mutton with vegetables, roasted veal, seasoned beef and mutton, soup and bouilli (boiled meat), veal and vegetables, and vegetable soup. The first commercial canners filled tin cans through a large hole, topped them with lids, and concluded by soldering the opening. The technology replaced the laborious, expensive job of manufacturing iron cans, which workers produced at the rate of sixty a day.

Stocking the Navy’s Pantry

Canned foods immediately began making culinary history. In 1814, English provisioners began stocking the pantry at the navy’s Bermuda hospital with canned goods. In that same period, when Britain’s Pacific penal colonies were relieving English jails of an overflow of criminals, transporting and growing enough food was so great a problem that both prisoners and jailers risked malnutrition and starvation. The first shipment of canned food left the British Isles for Australia in 1814. The next year, Arctic expeditioners Otto von Kotzebue and Sir William Edward Parry, on voyages to locate a Northwest Passage, improved their chances of survival by stocking ship and camp larders with tinned food and matches. Likewise, in 1818, the explorer John Ross packed tinned food during his trek to Baffin Bay; simultaneously, Lord William Pitt Amherst carried canned food on a state embassy to China. In 1820, the arctic expeditioner Sir John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist in Sir John Franklin’s exploration of the Canadian Arctic coast, advanced the primitive style of making pemmican by drying it in a malting kiln and preserving it in tins.

The advent of canned foods was a special boon to the navy. Captain Basil Hall of the Lyra, escort to Lord Amherst, wrote that he looked forward to provisioning in cans. It had distinct advantages over the practice of bringing aboard livestock, which drank up the vessel’s water supply and could tumble overboard, lose flesh from the roll of the ship, or die from falls or disease. Moreover, cans stacked easily and were immediately ready to serve, hot or cold. Hall summarized, “[Canned food] is not exposed to the vicissitudes of markets, nor is it scourged up to a monstrous price as at St. Helena, because there is no alternative. Besides these advantages it enables one to indulge in a number of luxuries which no care or expense could procure.” (Riddervold & Ropeid 1988, 156) Naval surgeons attested to the value of canned goods in improving the health and morale of officers and crew. In 1825, the Regulations and Instructions for the Medical Officers of His Majesty’s Fleet established the daily allotment of canned meat at two to six ounces per man in sick bay. Within six years, the shift in galley cookery affected all sailors.

In the quarter century before the invention of the can opener, the navy issued each mess a lever knife for opening tins along with instructions for testing the quality of the contents, which sometimes spoiled from rough handling during transport. The worst such instance occurred in 1845 on Sir John Franklin’s doomed arctic expedition aboard the Erebus and Terror, when many of his men, marooned by thick ice, died of starvation and scurvy. Authorities blamed the spoiled canned meat that an innovative processer, Stephen Goldner, had put up in large tins rather than single-serving cans and had underheated them. The failure temporarily altered military opinions of canning at England’s Victualling Yards and prompted a parliamentary investigation of food contractors. Sailors groused at the shift from time-honored salt beef and pork and dubbed tinned Irish beef “clews and lashings,” a reference to the cords that slung their hammocks from the bulkheads. (Ibid. 156)

Growing Consumer Acceptance

In the United States, canned foods slowly worked their way from institutional use to home kitchens and westward to the Indian reservations, where the availability of tinned food rapidly separated Native Americans from their traditional diet. By 1819, a factory in New York City was turning out tins of fish. Because of the difficulty of opening cans with hammer and chisel and the waste incurred when the top was hit too hard, home cooks bought few tinned products. In the 1820s, while pilchard and sardine canning began in Nantes, France, and salmon tinning in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Cork, Ireland, William Underwood of Boston widened the application of the Appert sterilization model, canning meat products in bottles and extending the technology to berries, jam and jelly, ketchup, milk, and pickles. In a move to counter prejudice against American canned foods and assure acceptance of his goods in English colonies, he affixed an English label to his wares.

In 1825, Thomas Kensett and his father-in-law, inventor Ezra Draggett, patented hermetic (airtight) canning in glass and marketed lobster, oysters, and salmon from their New York factory. Extensive breakage forced them to abandon glass in favor of tin.

Within a decade, provisioners could also purchase friction matches sealed in a can. These handy, waterproof containers of supplies found their way to wagon trains and homes on the North American frontier. Canning cost and efficiency improved in the mid-1800s. The first collapsible metal tube came on the market in 1842, introducing flexible packaging for such necessities as stove blacking and toothpaste. Henry Evans’s invention of a die-cutting operation in 1846 sped up can production tenfold, from six to sixty an hour. The U.S. inventor Allen Taylor refined machine stamping of tin cans the following year.

Because hopes remained high for the canned food industry, the Great Exhibition of 1851, held at London’s Crystal Palace, exhibited canned meat from Australia as an example of the unity of the British colonies in the task of feeding the world. The search for new ways to cap containers passed through several stages; among the substances considered were leather, waxed paper, skin, cork stoppers, and wax. Over two decades, from 1850 to 1870, various soldering processes enhanced the tightness of the seal to prevent botulism and decay in tinned foods. In 1856, the U.S. entrepreneur Gail Borden marketed condensed milk in a familiar red-and-white tin can manufactured in Walcottsville, Connecticut. Along with Van Camp’s pork and beans, canned milk was a staple of miners in the American West. To supply cook shacks on the gold fields of California and Alaska, shippers sent canned goods around Cape Horn by clipper.

Cheap canned meats from the United States flooded the markets in the 1860s. During the Civil War, canners added calcium chloride to canning water to raise the temperature. Canned cherries, tomatoes, corn, and peas from Northern canning factories helped the Union army and navy keep fit and well nourished while Southern soldiers, still dependent on agrarian methods of food preservation, often went hungry. One of the rebel army’s prize captures was a Union mess pantry, which yielded some of the first canned foods the Confederate men had ever encountered. Survivors from both sides returning from combat spread the word to wives at home that tinned food was safe and storable. When peace returned to the nation, H. J. Heinz added pickles, horseradish, sauerkraut, and macaroni dishes to the homemaker’s choices. To assist homemakers in recycling cans, the American Agriculturist published line drawings of cans reshaped into feed and grain cups, paint buckets, rat traps, scoops, saucepans, longhandled fruit pickers, graters, muffin rings, and micasided lanterns.

The canning jars used in home kitchens mimicked the stoneware crock favored by home canners but with a narrower neck to limit air-borne contamination. The factor-made canning jar, which came on the market in the 1850s, grew more popular in the late 1860s. Competing with patented goods were Peoria tomato jars from Illinois and yellow ware fruit jars made by John Bell in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and by H. H. Melick in Roseville, Ohio. In the 1870s, a home recipe explained how to reseal tin cans for reuse. The process called for heating block tin in a pot with gum shellac, brick dust, beeswax, and rosin. Lids stayed firmly on can necks dipped into the sealant. When it came time to open the can, the cork chipped away sealant with a sharp blade.

Improved Caps, Better Cans

Several advances in technology simplified the capping process. John B. Bartlett’s unique jars, invented around 1865, featured small glass feet to elevate the jar above boiling water and a complicated metal crossbar system that secured elastic bands over the cap. The Mudge cannery, promoted by Sarah Tyson Rorer, America’s first dietitian, was a patented cylindrical processor that held jars sealed with wire bail handles.

Simultaneous with the wire-bound cap, the familiar zinc cap and rubber ring came into use. These suited the high-shouldered Mason jar, the invention of the New Yorker John Landis Mason in November 1858. Formed of greenish-blue glass in a mold, the jars offered visual proof that the contents had retained their original color and shape. By matching neck threads to the screw cap, the canner could form a seal as hot liquids cooled. As noted in C. D. Tuska’s Patent Notes for Engineers (1947), Mason was a prime example of the unwary inventor who fails to file a patent until too late. In Mason’s case, a lawsuit carried to the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of the thief. In 1869, Lewis Boyd’s patented glass-lined zinc cap further eroded the value of the original Mason patent.

For commercial canneries, a removable tear-strip and keywind simplified the use of cans in 1866; sideseaming of cans became commercially feasible in 1877. Another technological advance, the combination of Allen Taylor’s drop press and A. K. Shriver’s pressure-cooking “retort,” enabled canners to surround containers with steam that equalized pressure in the contents to speed cooking. By 1880, canners in Baltimore were turning out 45 million pound-sized cans of food annually. Franco-American boosted selection in the 1880s with production of canned entrées.

Home canners continued putting up their own fruits, vegetables, and meats in glass jars submerged in a boiling water bath. Essential implements to the task included a broad-mouthed canning funnel or fruit jar filler, a knife for dislodging air pockets, a metal jar lifter or jar tong for removing jars from the water bath, and hot pads on which the jars cooled. Optional were the fruit jar wrench, which tightened or loosened threaded zinc caps or screw-on jar lids, and a jar wrench or jar opener, which lifted flat canning lids to release the vacuum seal.

In 1890, Amanda Theodosia Jones, the inventor of an exhaust system, opened an all-woman canning factory that revolutionized the industry. At the end of the century, when canned foods became a kitchen standard, Campbell Soup Company’s John Dorrance expanded canned foods to include condensed soups. Women’s magazines featured recipes designed around canned ingredients. Full-page advertisements pictured smiling, contented women in their own kitchens opening packaged crackers and cookies and canned ham and corned beef.

The history of the canning industry in Australia paralleled that of Europe and the United States and freed the island nation from dependence on British food processors. In 1846, Sizar Elliot opened the island nation’s first cannery in Sydney. Queensland canners dominated the export market in 1869. Victoria and Ardmona entered the business in the early 1900s by tinning fruit. At Bathurst in 1926 Edgell & Sons canned the first tinned asparagus; in 1935, at Richmond, Victoria, Heinz & Company marketed tinned baked beans in tomato sauce. During World War II, Australian canners added cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and whole tomatoes to their line of goods. In 1957, island manufacturers reduced costs by plating their own tin for cans.

Globally, canning innovations continued in the twentieth century with J. F. Pont’s Amsterdam firm, which capped wide-mouth glass milk bottles, and the Ball canning jar company, which began producing glass canning jars in 1886. Ball’s market dominance lasted into the 1940s with tall wide-mouthed freezer jars, which sealed food odors and flavors inside to protect the environment of home freezers and commercial lockers. The introduction of canning to the Hawaiian Islands early in the twentieth century provided American and European markets with the exotic taste of pineapple year-round. In 1906, the collaboration of the American Can Company with Oahu Rail and Land Company railroad and the development of a peeling and coring device by Honolulu Iron Works expedited the processing of canned pineapple rings, a popular item in home recipes and on buffets. The publication of recipes calling for canned pineapple quickly established it as a novel and affordable taste sensation. James Dole of the Dole Pineapple Company earned enough profit to buy the island of Lanai and plant 20,000 acres.

An important innovation, the sanitary lid, introduced in 1900, folded over rather than being soldered to seal a can. The technology worked well for ripe olives, which had never been preserved in sealed containers. Ball brought out the Sure Seal jar in 1908, when the company added the Lightning Closure, a wire bail that held the glass lid against a rubber sealing ring. Zinc compounds strengthened can liners and extended shelf life in the 1920s. By 1922, the introduction of the crimped lid sped up the canning process and reduced costs, making canned foods more affordable.

Advantages: Cleanliness, Convenience

Aiding the progress of canned fruits and vegetables from emergency supplies to pantry staples were product endorsements from such famous domestic experts as Fannie Farmer, Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln, and Sarah Tyson Rorer. In 1898, Anna Barrows, founder and editor of New England Kitchen Magazine, declared that canned foods could not compare with garden-fresh produce. By 1914, however, she had changed her mind, claiming that she actually preferred canned goods to fresh-picked goods. She based her endorsement on improved sanitation in canning factories, where food passed rapidly through the process without being contaminated by human hands or exposed to the air to wilt or spoil. She stated, “The advantages offered by all these processes in preserving food in perfect cleanliness cannot be overlooked by the housekeeper who struggles to keep her kitchen and its contents free from dirt, germs, and consequent disease.” (Shapiro 1986, 203)

Improved technology aided both commercial and domestic canning. In 1926, canning entered a new phase with the research of Norwegian chemist Erik Rotheim, developer of the aerosol can. Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan applied the technology to home spray cans. Marketers embraced the technology first for distributing wax, paint, and home pesticides and later for spraying cooking oil on frying pans. The lifting of jars in home canners entered a new era with the marketing of the Iron Horse Cold Pack, invented by Oscar Herman Benson in his own kitchen and made by the Rochester Can Company in 1930. The cylindrical tin kettle held a wire frame to accommodate eight one-quart jars, which the canner lifted in one motion by grasping handles that extended above the boiling water.

In the November 1930 issue of Good Housekeeping, the magazine’s institute reported on new U.S. labeling requirements for canned goods. Two months earlier, President Herbert Hoover had signed into law the McNary-Mapes Act, which strengthened the Pure Food Law of 1906. The new act required canneries to label all low-grade products except milk and meat, which were regulated under another statute. By distinguishing the bottom grade of a substandard season from high quality produce from better harvests, the Department of Agriculture began the move toward complete standardization of canned food.

After World War II, the Hak family of Giessen, Holland, advanced from marketing potatoes to selling groceries and canned foods. Their line started with applesauce, which they canned in a home kettle. They were more successful with beets, broad beans, butter beans, and carrots. In the 1960s, the firm shifted to glass jars, which allowed consumers a full view of what they were buying. Consumer preference for glass jars over tin cans soon established the Hak label with its slogan “Natur-Garten” as a sign of quality. Through successful advertising, the company expanded to worldwide sale of more than forty products.

Written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass in "Encyclopedia of Kitchen History", Fitzroy Dearborn (An Imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group- New York/London, 2004, excerpts pp.158-164 and contribution of  Amy Tikkanen. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.