Soup by Janet Clarkson

Author:Janet Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

A promotional postcard featuring Campbell’s Soup Kids.

Canned Soup

Historically, war has been a great stimulus to invention and innovation, and it was due to Napoleon Bonaparte – the man who acknowledged that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ – that the canning industry got started. Napoleon had the largest land army in history, an army too large to live off the land, as armies had traditionally done over the centuries. The logistics of carrying the required huge quantities of food stimulated the food preservation committee of the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale to offer large cash prizes for improved methods of preserving food for military use. The news was tempting music to the ears of a small-town mayor, chef and confectioner called Nicolas Appert. Food preservation was already Appert’s pet interest, and he had a small but successful business in supplying preserves to the gourmet market, with some tentative interest from the French Navy. An understanding of the role of ‘germs’ did not begin until Louis Pasteur’s seminal work in the 1860s, but a combination of heat and air-exclusion was already known empirically to help keep foods from spoiling. Appert worked on his method of ‘canning’ in glass jars, and in 1810 published his findings and obtained his reward.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.