Napoleon, the French Military, and the History of Canning

If you’re at all like me, you’ll occasionally stumble on the backstory for some everyday whatever and realize you had never before even thought to consider how such a thing came to be.

Which is how I got to writing this post presenting to you what I’ve learned about…

Canning.

I know, I know, the topic doesn’t sound all that interesting, does it? But it is, and that’s what was kind of surprising.

The Who behind the Canning Revolution

Though people believe households had long known how to preserve fresh food by sealing it in jars and boiling them until cooked, no one had taken the method into the product realm at any kind of scale until our sharp-faced little prove-it-to-you Nicolas Appert came along.

This guy:

Woodcut print of Nicolas Appert by Édouard Foucaud.

Doesn’t he have that “oh yeah, let me show you something” look on his face right there?

Appert didn’t start life as an inventor. Far from it. He and his brother first had a brewery, from which he branched out into working as a chef and a confectioner of candies and sweets.

People on the Move Need to Eat Already

Why, then, did Nicolas Appert turn his attention to canning?

The answer is simple: As with a lot of things, he was motivated by the promise of a good hunk of money.

People everywhere need to eat well to work well, and militaries are no exception. As it headed into what are now known as the Napoleonic Wars, the French government needed a way to keep its troops fed in far-flung locales and while on the move to get there.

Without a reliable way to preserve food, military units and seafaring folk and travelers in general before canning came along had to subsist as best they could on iffily-safe dried, smoked, fermented, and pickled foods.

And I think we can all agree that hungry or food-poisoned troops are not effective troops.

So, in 1795, the French government offered a hefty cash prize for anyone who could develop a way to safely preserve food in quantity.

This got Appert’s attention.

A Problem More Than a Decade in the Solving

Appert’s experiments showed him that food cooked in a sealed jar stayed safe to eat as long as the jar remained unopened and the seal intact.

The French Navy tested Appert’s method in 1806 and found it valid. However, the government refused to pay him the promised cash reward until he published his process for the general public.

Appert’s 1810 pamphlet, L'Art de conserver les substances animales et végétales (The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances), is today considered the first scientific treatise on food preservation. It cemented him in historians’ minds as the progenitor of food science.

Fun fact: His original jars? Repurposed champagne bottles. But of course.

It Worked, but Appert Didn’t Know Why

As has been the case with many inventions, Appert had no clue how his process exactly worked to keep food from spoiling. He just knew that it did. Science just wasn’t there yet to give him the rationale.

It took another French scientist, Louis Pasteur, to come along fifty years later to show the world how sealing containers protects their contents from the introduction of microorganisms. But that’s a story for another day.

All this to say that, the next time you pop open a jar of tomato sauce, you know who to thank—even if Appert couldn’t have told you why it worked to ensure you didn’t poison yourself with your spaghetti.