The sweet-sour vinegary smell hit me as soon as I got off the school bus. I wrinkled my nose, wishing I could get back on the bus and go someplace – anyplace – else. Nana was making her prize-winning chilli sauce, as she did each September. Every window was open on those sunny Indian summer days, and the aroma permeated the entire area, even creeping into my mom and dad’s house next door.
There was no escape.
Eventually I grew to love that chilli sauce, and now make it at least every other year, so there’s always some on hand both for our own use and to give as gifts.
The chilli sauce, and the apple butter that followed on its heels, marked the end of months of food preservation that began in June with making strawberry jam and freezing peas, through canning peaches and tomatoes, freezing and/or canning raspberries and blackberries, lima beans, corn and more. Most often the entire family got involved. We’d sit around the newspaper-covered kitchen table, diving in as the contents of heaping bushel baskets were dumped on the table. We’d immediately grab a handful and start shelling, peeling, cutting, etc. into metal pie tins. Even when my grandfather was in his 90s, he could still shell peas and beans faster that the rest of us combined.
Food preservation is as old as agriculture.
For millennia, that consisted of smoking, salting, drying and, eventually, sugaring.
Strangely enough, the next major advance in food preservation was developed in pursuit of military conquest.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s place in history is secured because of his political and military achievements. Less well-known, but probably as important, is his role in the development of canning.
“An army travels on its stomach,” Napoleon famously said. He knew that brilliant military strategies were worth little if his troops couldn’t eat well enough to keep healthy and strong for battle. In those days, armies in foreign lands mostly lived off whatever food they could steal, pillage, forage or buy – a chancy proposition at best, one that had crippled countless military campaigns. In 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc reward (a fortune in those days) to anyone who could develop a method of preserving large quantities of food.
A French brewer and confectioner, Nicholas Appert, collected the prize, having observed that food cooked inside a glass jar didn’t spoil unless its seal leaked. He developed a method for sealing without ever knowing why it was necessary: it would be another half-century before Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microbes in food spoilage.
