Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (34 page)

Perishable milk was preserved, too: in the east, by curdling and fermenting it into yogurty products and sour drinks such as the Kazakh
kumiss,
or by evaporating it into milk powder (a Mongol invention); and in the West by turning it into highly salted cheese or
butter, packed in well-glazed earthenware pots. In Aelfric’s
Colloquy
the “salter” remarks, “You would lose all your butter and cheese were I not at hand to protect it for you.” Medieval salty butter was far saltier than our “salted butter,” which is seasoned to suit our palate rather than for preservation. A typical modern salted butter contains 1—2 percent salt, whereas medieval butter contained 5–10 times as much: according to a record of 1305, 1 pound of salt was needed for 10 pounds of butter, i.e., the butter was 10 percent salt. Eaten straight, this would have been foul. Cooks needed to go to great lengths to wash much of the salt out again before it was used.

Salt was also used to preserve the fragile flesh of fish. The Scottish kipper was not invented until the nineteenth century, but before that, there were Smokies and Buckies and Bervies, all names for cured haddock produced near Aberdeen, heavily smoked over peat and decayed moss. Salted and pickled fish were staple proteins in Europe, particularly on Fridays. Since preclassical times there had been a significant trade in salted fish, first from Egypt and Spain, then from Greece and Rome. During the Middle Ages, making salt herring from the North and Baltic Seas was a major industry. It was not an easy product to manufacture. As an oily fish, herring turns rancid very fast and ideally it should be salted within twenty-four hours of being caught, or even sooner. In the fourteenth century, herring merchants were able to streamline the process considerably once they developed techniques for salting the herring on board ship; the fish was then repacked once they reached the shore. The Dutch in particular proved masters at this, which may be how they achieved their dominance of the European market. Dutch herring gutters could process up to 2,000 fish an hour at sea. This speed had an additional benefit, though the gutters would not have been aware of it. In their haste, they failed to eviscerate a part of the stomach containing trypsin, a chemical that speeds up the curing process.

The monotony of a diet in which the only fish you ever ate was preserved may be gauged by the number of jokes these items gave rise to. “You dried stockefish, you, out of my sight!” says one character
to another in
A Pleasant Comedie, Called Wily Beguilde
(Anon., 1606). A red herring—which was a particularly pungent cured fish, double “hard smoked” as well as salted—remains in our language as something comically deceptive or out of place.

Sweet preserved foods tended to have much more luxurious and pleasurable connotations. In hot Mediterranean countries, the most expedient way to preserve fruits and vegetables was to dry them: grapes became “raisins of the sun,” plums became prunes, dates and figs shriveled up and intensified in sweetness. The basic technology of drying fruit was very simple: in biblical times and before, juicy fruits and vegetables were buried in hot sand or spread out on trays or rooftops, to become desiccated in the sun’s rays. In Eastern Europe, however, where the sun was less fierce, they developed more sophisticated methods. Beginning in the Middle Ages, in Moravia and Slovakia, special drying-houses were built, with rooms filled with wicker frames laden with the prepared fruit, with constantly burning stoves set underneath the frames to generate enough dry heat to convert apricots into long-lasting dried apricots and cherries into chewy dried cherries.

The equivalent in the rich houses of England was the cool “stillroom,” in which servants distilled spirits, bottled fruits, candied nuts and citrus peel, and made marmalades (originally, from quinces), jams, and sweetmeats. The art of candying was rife with alchemical superstitions and “secrets.” Each fruit had its own imperatives. According to a medieval book, walnuts should be preserved on June 24, St. John’s Day. Fruits for preserving were picked almost ripe rather than fully ripe, because they were more likely to hold their shape. “The best way to preserve gooseberries green and whole” was a recipe in Hannah Wolley’s
Queen-like Closet
of 1672. Wolley’s method was tediously long: three soakings in warm water, three boilings in sugar syrup, then a final boiling in a fresh sugar syrup. No wonder it was hard work: the work of the stillroom was a kind of magic, a staving off of decay comparable to the embalming of the dead.

The most remarkable thing about fruit preserves was the fact that they really did preserve the fruit (at least, most of the time). Throughout history, cooks have aimed to make food safe to eat; and often, they succeeded. Yet until the 1860s, when Louis Pasteur uncovered the microorganisms responsible for spoiling food and drink, cooks had no real knowledge of why food preservation worked. The prevailing view was that decomposition was caused by spontaneous generation, in other words, that mysterious unseen forces caused the mold to grow. People knew nothing of microbes, the living organisms—fungi, bacteria, and yeasts, among others—that cause beneficial fermentation in wine and cheese, and toxic fermentation when food degrades.

Greek women spreading figs in the sun to dry did not know that they were killing off invisible microbes (bacteria need moisture to flourish and when food dehydrates, they mostly die). The farmers’ wives who pickled onions in vinegar did not understand how acidity protects against the growth of molds (microbes prefer alkaline conditions)—they just knew that pickled onions kept longer than unpickled onions. Methods of preservation developed slowly and cautiously. Keeping food safe to eat was a process of trial and error; but because error could mean death, there was little incentive to embark on new trials. Having found something that did successfully keep food edible for a long period of time, you stuck to it. Except for the sixteenth-century discovery of conserving meat in a layer of fat or oil (whether duck confit or the potted meats of England), the technology of preservation made no advances from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then came the can.

 

E
ven Nicolas Appert, the Frenchman who invented canning—a very modern system of preservation—did not fully comprehend how or why it worked. He claimed it was “the fruit of my dreams, of
my reflections, of my researches.” Appert was originally a brewer who next worked as a steward to the aristocracy, and later, in Napoleonic times, as a confectioner. He was said to be a cheerful individual, with very thick black eyebrows and a bald head. Although he made one of the great advances in food technology of the nineteenth century, he derived no lasting benefit from it and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

In 1795, the French government, then embroiled in war with Britain, sought better ways of feeding its armed forces. Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could come up with the best new way of preserving food. Meanwhile, Appert, then running his confectionery on the rue des Lombards in Paris, was preoccupied with the same question. He knew how to conserve and candy countless different fruits in sugar, but he felt sure that there must be a more “natural” way of achieving the same effect. In Appert’s view, all of the traditional methods of preserving were faulty. Drying foods took away their essential texture; salt made foods “acerbic”; sugar concealed the true flavors. Appert sought a technique that would preserve without destroying the true characteristics of any given ingredient. He experimented with conserving fruits and vegetables and meat stews in champagne bottles, heating them in baths of hot water. Over time, he switched the champagne bottles for wider-necked bottles. Eventually, he felt confident enough to send a few samples to the French navy. The response was positive: the minister of the navy commented that Appert’s beans and green peas had “all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.”
Le Courier de l’Europe
was still more fulsome in its praise: “M. Appert has found a way to fix the seasons.” The 12,000 franc prize was duly awarded to him.

Appert’s method was very simple. It consisted of nothing more than heating food in a water bath in corked bottles. In 1810, Appert published a book revealing his secrets. The foods that Appert preserved in his corked bottles were exotic: artichokes, truffles, chestnuts, young partridges, grape must, sorrel, asparagus, apricots, red currants, soup of julienned vegetables, new-laid eggs. But in essence
it was the same process by which every can of tuna and every can of corn kernels is still manufactured: in a sealed container heated in steam.

Appert, however, was not the one to capitalize on it. By accepting his prize, he forwent the chance to patent his invention. Just months after Appert’s book on canning came out in 1810, an English broker, Peter Durand, rushed out a patent for a method of food preservation suspiciously similar to Appert’s. The patent was purchased for £1,000 by Brian Donkin, an engineer with an eye for the main chance. In 1813, Donkin, with his business partners, Messrs. Hall and Gamble, opened a factory nicknamed the “Preservatory” in Bermondsey, churning out foods processed by Appert’s technique, heating them in closed containers in boiling water for as long as six hours. There was one crucial difference. They found Appert’s glass bottles to be too fragile. Instead, Donkin, Hall, and Gamble packed their food—carrots, veal, meat soup, boiled beef, and suchlike—into tin-coated iron canisters: tin cans.

These early cans of food were not without problems. The most immediate was that there was a lag of fifty years between Appert’s discovery and the invention of the first can openers. This is a glaring example of how technology can proceed in fits and starts. Until the 1860s, cans of bully beef (much used by armies) or salmon or cling peaches would come with instructions to “cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer.”

The first custom-made can opener was designed by Robert Yeates, a maker of surgical instruments and cutlery, in 1855: it was a vicious clawlike lever attached to a wooden handle. The idea was to gouge the lever into the top of the can and then forcefully cut around, leaving a jagged edge. It did the job—but not well. The history of can openers is riddled with unsatisfactory designs: the Warner, much used during the American Civil War, with a sharp sickle on the end, fine for a battlefield but deadly for use in a normal kitchen; an 1868 key to open a can by rolling a strip of the top metal off, which turned out to be ideal for sardine cans, not so good for the
normal cylindrical tins, because it only opened a portion of the circular lid; the electric openers of the 1930s that introduced an unnecessary element of complexity to the task at hand. Finally, in the 1980s, a device appeared that did the job with minimal danger or exertion for the user. The side-opening can opener—which can now be purchased at modest cost in many variations—is one of the great unsung heroes of the modern kitchen. Instead of piercing the top of the can, it uses two wheels in tandem, one rotating, one serrated, removing the entire lid and leaving no sharp edge. It’s an inspired tool, the only shame being that it wasn’t invented sooner. The canned food industry is now shifting to pop-top self-opening cans, eliminating the need to own a can opener at all.

Aside from the challenge of getting at the food inside the cans, canning posed another danger: it did not always succeed in preserving the food. In 1852, thousands of cans of meat supplied to the British navy were inspected and found to be unfit to eat, “their contents being masses of putrefaction” causing a dreadful “stench” when opened. It was generally assumed that canned meat spoiled because “air has penetrated into the canister, or was not originally entirely exhausted.” Until Louis Pasteur, it wasn’t known that there is a class of microbe that can flourish without air: to kill these, the crucial factor is thorough heating. The original size of cans had been around 2 to 4 pounds (as against ¼ to 1 pound for average cans today); these navy cans were massive, holding on average 10 pounds of meat. The heating time in the factory should have been correspondingly increased, but it wasn’t, leaving putrid pockets in the middle of the can.

By the 1870s, the quality of canned food had improved, and cans were starting to open up global food markets as never before. British workers sat down to a supper of Fray Bentos corned beef from Uruguay. Canned hams traveled all the way from Bermondsey to China. American consumers were introduced to ingredients they might seldom otherwise have tasted. One historian of canning noted that the American family could now pick from “a kitchen garden
where all good things grow . . . filled with raspberries, apricots, olives, and pineapples,” not to mention “baked beans.”

It was a garden, however, in which many of the plants tasted slightly strange. True, Italian canned tomatoes can be a joy—not by themselves, but slow-simmered in countless pasta sauces: puttanesca, amatriciana. But spinach in a can—sorry, Popeye—is sludgy and metallic. Canned pineapple and peaches are fine (though they lack the perfume of fresh fruit), but canned raspberries are mush. Today, cans are more significant as packaging for drinks (fizzy sodas, beer) than food: world sales of processed food in cans are around 75 billion units a year, as against 320 billion units for canned drinks.