You wait to eat until nighttime. That is, after all, when the selection for food is at its best. You and all your buddies get together and swim up near the surface where the picking is good, for your favorite, plankton. And then. It happens. A few minutes later and you can’t find your way home. Everyone is bumping into everybody else, caught in some net, and before you know it, you are dipped in brine and on your way to the canning factory.
Yes, those are the last few hours of many a sardine.
It is best not to think of this when I enjoy them on saltine crackers. In fact, now that I put this picture in my head, I may have to lay off the sardines for a while.
I am not sure how many people actually care about the canning of the sardine, as it is on the decline right now. Currently, it is banned altogether off the United States shores of the Pacific Ocean.
But on this day, February 17, back in 1876, a guy named Julius Wolff of Eastport, Maine, was the first person to can sardines.
Boy, I bet he really packed them in there.
Canning hadn’t been around all that long. We have Napoleon to thank for our food in cans. Sort of.
During the first years of the Napoleonic Wars, the French government needed to feed its hungry soldiers. So, they made a little contest of things, offering an award of 12,000 francs to any creative inventor who could come up with a method of preserving large amounts of food. But the method had to be efficient and cheap, as the lack of food for the fighting masses was causing a problem for the French.
So, in 1809, a man named Nicolas Appert came to the call. He was a confectioner and brewer. And, in all his brewing and confectioning, he observed that food cooked inside a jar did not spoil unless the seals leaked.
He came up with a way to seal food in jars and won the prize, those 12,000 francs. Which, by the way, is $13,398.67 US dollars, by today’s standard exchange. Big bucks, back in 1809.
They didn’t really know the “why” behind how this worked. It just did. Seal food in, keep air out. It would be another fifty years before Louis Pasteur demonstrated the role of microbes in food spoilage.
As far as the war went. Well, the French Army began experimenting with issuing canned foods to its soldiers. But the process was very slow. And shipping large amounts of food was not easy to do, all that glass. So, the war ended before they worked out the process. As such, the canning process was gradually adopted and explored in other European countries and in the US.
The first metal can came along in Great Britain in 1812. Bryan Donkin developed the method of putting food in sealed airtight cans that were made of tinned wrought iron. Tinned wrought iron. If it sounds difficult, it was. The canning process was extremely slow and labor-intensive. Those cans had to be hand-made. Each one of them. It would take up to six hours, which made canned food too expensive for ordinary people.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, at about the same time, Robert Ayars established the first American canning factory in New York City in 1812. He used slightly improved tin-plated wrought-iron cans for lots of things like oysters, meats, fruits, and vegetables.
A couple of items to note. On January 5, 1858, Waterbury, Connecticut native Ezra J. Warner invented the first US can opener. Yes. I noticed too. That is more than 40 years after the invention of the tin can.
And then there is this. In 1974, some folks found the wreck of the Bertrand, a steamboat that sank in the Missouri River in 1865. When they explored the contents of that boat, they found a stock of canned foods. Those goods were tested by the National Food Processors Association. They said that although the appearance, smell, and vitamin content had deteriorated, there was no trace of microbial growth. So that food, in those 109-year-old cans, was still safe to eat.
Bon Appétit
And remember, always remember,
If you believe it, you can.
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“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell
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“Wisest is she who knows she does not know.”
― Jostein Gaarder
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“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
― Robertson Davies
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I think I can. I think I can. I do the can-can.
