Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  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.

  Even 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 tom
atoes 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.

  In the end, the technology that most improved the diet of American families was not canning but refrigeration, which really did give people access to “a kitchen garden where all good things grow.”

  In 1833, a surprising consignment arrived in Calcutta, then the center of the British Empire in India. It was forty tons of pure crystalline ice, which had come all the way from Boston on the East Coast of the United States, a journey of 16,000 miles, shipped by Frederick Tudor, an ice entrepreneur.

  The Boston-to-Calcutta ice trade was a sign of how America was turning ice into profit. As an abundant natural resource, ice is ancient. There were ice harvests in China before the first millennium BC. Snow was sold in Athens beginning in the fifth century BC. Aristocrats of the seventeenth century spooned desserts from ice bowls, drank wine chilled with snow, and even ate iced creams and water ices. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century in the United States that ice became an industrial commodity. And it was only the Americans who recognized and exploited the fact that the biggest bucks were not in making icy treats but in using ice for refrigeration: the preservation of food.

  Cold storage was not unknown before the nineteenth century. Many estates in Italy had their own icehouses, such as the one in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. These were pits or vaults, heavily insulated—usually with turf or straw—in which unevenly hacked slabs of winter ice could be kept cold for the summer. These houses were not, however, principally devices for preserving food but were for preserving ice, so that it would be ready for cooling drinks or making lavish ice creams at the height of summer. The icehouse may sometimes have been used to supplement a larder—but the primary function was keeping its owners supplied with sweet cold treats, the accoutrements of civilized living. To have access to ice in the summer—to flout the seasons—was a sure sign of wealth. “The rich get their ice in the summer, but the poor get theirs in the winter,” as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her book about life married to a struggling farmer on the Dakota prairie in the 1880s.

  In America at large—a country of vast distances and extremes of climate—the lack of ice affected the entire food supply. Butter, fish, milk, and meat could only be sold locally. Most butchers killed only what meat they could sell in a single day. Unsold meat—known as the shambles—was left to rot on the streets. Unless you were a country dweller with a kitchen garden, green vegetables were a rarity. The basic diet was salt pork and bread or corn bread. Consumers in the city and producers in the countryside had few ways to reach one another. In 1803, an enterprising Maryland farmer named Thomas Moore worked out that he could sell more butter if he could take it further to market. Moore created one of the very first “refrigerators”: an egg-shaped cedar-wood tub, with an inner metal container for the butter. Between the metal and the wood, there was a gap, which could be packed with ice.

  The first great technological breakthrough in the American ice industry was the horse-drawn ice cutter, patented by Nathaniel J. Wyeth in 1829. Before this, ice was harvested—with great difficulty, using axes and saws—in uneven blocks. With far less effort, for the humans, if not the horses, Wyeth’s ice cutter produced perfect square blocks, easy to stack and transport. There were epic profits to be made. As of 1873, it cost 20 cents a ton to harvest ice on the Hudson River. This could be sold on to private customers for as much as $4 to $8 a ton, a potential profit margin of 4,000 percent.

  In 1855, horsepower was joined by steam power in the ice harvest, and as many as 600 tons could now be harvested in a single hour. Supply increased; but so did demand. In 1856, New York City used 100,000 tons of ice; in 1879–1880, the city needed nearly 1 million tons, and rising. Nearly half of all the ice sold went to private families. Ice companies delivered ice on wagons or trucks for a flat daily or monthly charge. Ice was kept in an icebox—a primitive refrigerator, little more than a tin- or zinc-lined wooden box with shelves like a kitchen cabinet, with a drainage hole at the bottom for the meltwater. Iceboxes were smelly and inefficient, with no means of circulating the air. But still—what a boon—to be able to enjoy cold-ish food on a July day; to stop fresh milk from going sour for a few hours, if not days; to chill a bowl of plums.

  Ice wrought its greatest nineteenth-century transformations, however, not in private homes but in the commercial food supply. A combination of vast cold-storage warehouses and refrigerated railroad cars opened up entirely new food markets. The meat, dairy, and fresh produce industries were the biggest winners. By the time of World War II, Americans were known around the world for their seemingly inordinate appetite for meat and milk (supplemented with glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice and green salads). This appetite—and the means of satisfying it—was largely a creation of nineteenth-century refrigeration.

  In 1851, butter was first transported in refrigerated railroad cars from New York City to Boston. Fish, too, began to travel the country, and in 1857, fresh meat went from New York to the western states. Refrigerated “beef cars” created a new meatpacking industry, centered in Chicago. This was a very American phenomenon: by 1910, there were 85,000 refrigerated cars in the United States, compared to just 1,085 in Europe (mostly in Russia). Fresh meat no longer had to be slaughtered and used immediately. “Dressed beef” could be cooled, stored, and shipped anywhere.

  The new refrigerated cars had fierce critics, as do all new food technologies. Local butchers and slaughterhouses objected to the loss of business and lamented Chicago’s growing monopoly on meat (and judging from the horrific conditions in Chicago meatpacking factories described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, they may have had a point). More generally, the population at large was scared of the very thing that made refrigeration so useful: its ability to extend the storage time of food. Alongside the growth in refrigerated cars was a huge growth in cold-storage warehouses. By 1915, 100 million tons of butter in America were in cold storage. Critics argued that “delayed storage” could not be good for the food, reducing its palatability and nutritional value. Another persistent worry was that cold storage was a scam: by delaying the sale of produce, the sellers could push prices up.

  One more concern about refrigeration—particularly for dairy foods, whose storage need to be scrupulously clean—was that natural ice was not always pristine, often containing dirt, pond weeds, and other vegetation. Local boards of health would periodically condemn large amounts of naturally harvested ice as unfit for human consumption.

  This was one of the reasons refrigeration in America increasingly moved from natural ice to factory-made ice. Humans had known ways of making artificial ice for centuries, but by and large they had done so not for the purposes of refrigeration but for making ice creams and cold drinks. The Elizabethan scientist Francis Bacon was one of the few exceptions. According to the biographer John Aubrey, Bacon died in 1626 from a chill contracted while attempting to use snow to preserve a chicken. He also conducted investigations into the use of saltpeter, for what he called “the experiment of the artificial turning of water into ice.” Bacon attacked the frivolous uses to which the rich tended to put their ice. It was “poore and contemptible” to manufacture ice purely for such niceties as cooling their wines instead of using it for “conservatories,” by which he meant refrigerators. Bacon was surely right that this was largely a question of priorities. Whereas refrigeration was neglected for centuries, the technology of ice cream was extremely advanced.

  The ad for Mrs. Marshall’s Patent Freezer, an ice-cream maker from 1885, shows a picture of a shallow, circular, hand-cranked machine and includes this boast:

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bsp; MARSHALL’S PATENT FREEZER

  Smooth and Delicious Ice produced in three minutes.

  Ice cream in three minutes? By hand? Today, the top-of-the-line electric ice-cream makers aimed at home cooks at a cost of $100 to $200 boast that they can deliver “ice cream or sorbet in less than thirty minutes.” How could Mrs. Marshall’s machine possibly have made ice cream in a tenth the time, without the aid of electricity?

  It sounds like commercial hype. Mrs. Marshall was an extremely shrewd businesswoman, skilled at promoting her own interests. A mother of four from St. John’s Wood in North London, she ran a school of cookery at 31 Mortimer Street, first established in 1883. Judging from the portraits in her books, she was an attractive brunette, rather in the mold of the dark beauties painted by John Singer Sargent: a bright gaze, bosomy blouses, tumbling curls piled up on her head. Fairly soon after her cookery school was established, Mrs. Marshall branched out with a shop, offering to equip entire kitchens with every utensil and appliance necessary, from knife cleaners to ornate ice-cream molds. She also sold essences, condiments, and food colorings and wrote cookbooks—two on ice cream and one on general cookery—always including plenty of ads at the back of the book for her own range of products.