Anybody can do canning at home — that is, preserving food in sealed containers, usually glass jars. Canning is also sometimes called “appertization,” which is a reference to Nicolas Appert. Appert was born November 17, 1749 in France, and while he (probably) didn’t invent canning, he was the first to really systematize it.
Appert was born into a family that ran an inn, where he worked until he was 20. At that point he opened a brewery with his brother. After doing that for a few years, he became the head chef to the Count of Zweibrücken. He evidently liked that job enough to keep it for 13 years, only giving it up with the French Revolution arose.
In the French Revolution, Appert was one of the revolutionaries, and even participated in some way in the execution of King Louis XVI. In the chaotic aftermath, also known as the Reign of Terror, he was himself arrested, in 1794. We don’t know what he was suspected of, but he was evidently cleared within a year or so. Then in 1795 he started experimenting with what he’s still known for: preserving food.
It’s likely that individuals were already preserving food in jars, but Appert approached the project systematically, arriving at a process of putting food (everything from vegetables to jams, soups, and jellies) into glass jars, sealing them with cork and wax, and putting the jars in boiling water.
By 1804 Appert had a repeatable process, and founded a business near Paris: La Maison Appert. It was the world’s first food bottling business. He initially used champagne bottles, but since it’s difficult to put anything in that sort of bottle unless it’s liquid, he switched to large-mouth glass jars not too different from the Mason jars still used nowadays. La Maison Appert canned practically every kind of food available at the time. As a former head chef, Appert himself probably did some or all of the cooking, but nobody knows for sure.
By all reports, Appert was an excellent cook and technically adept at the canning process, but he was not a very good businessman, and La Maison Appert went bankrupt in 1806. The business did not shut down, though, and in 1810 the French Bureau of Arts and Manufactures gave Appert a large monetary grant, and he made his process public by publishing his book L’Art de conserver les substances animales et végétales (The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances). It was the first book ever published (in Europe, at least) on modern food preservation.
Although Appert’s process worked to preserve food indefinitely, Appert himself never understood why — we now know it was because bacteria was eliminated, but in those days nobody yet knew about bacteria. Nevertheless, thanks to his book, the process became widely used, and before long someone else (British inventor Peter Durand) came up with a variation that used a metal can rather than a glass jar, and modern-style canned goods became available.
Appert received quite a bit of acclaim, and is memorialized in Paris by both a street (Rue Nicoas-Appert) and a statue in Paris. But in spite of his awards and recognition he never achieved financial success, and was impoverished when he died in 1841.
The French Ministry of Culture declared 2010 Nicolas Appert Year, and the Institute of Food Technologists in Chicago presents the Nicolas Appert Award for lifetime achievements every year. And thanks to Appert, it’s easy and safe to save some of that excellent strawberry jam you just made, so you can enjoy it next summer.
