Canned Meats
Around 1800, a French brewer and
confectioner named Nicolas Appert
discovered that if he sealed food in a glass
container and then heated the container in
boiling water, the food would keep
indefinitely without spoiling. This was the
beginning of canning, a form of preservation
in which the food is first isolated from air and
external contamination by microbes, and then
heated sufficiently to destroy any microbes
already in the food. (Pasteur hadn’t yet proven
the existence of microbes; Appert simply
observed that all “ferments” were destroyed in
his process.) When done properly, canning is
quite effective: canned meat a century old has
been eaten without harm, if also without much
pleasure. The canning of meats is almost
exclusively an industrial process today, in part
because it offers the cook little in the way of
desirable flavors or textures.