Nicolas Appert
French confectioner and inventor of airtight food preservation
Biography
Nicolas Appert (Châlons-en-Champagne, 1749 – Massy, 1841) was a French confectioner and chef who is credited with inventing airtight food preservation. He lived through the transition from the Old Regime to the Napoleonic era, a period in which war and revolution turned the supply of food into a matter of state. His work gave rise to the canning industry and laid the groundwork for heat sterilisation, although he never fully understood why his method worked.
Born on 17 November 1749 in Châlons-en-Champagne, he was the ninth of eleven children. His family kept an inn in the town, and he worked in the family business until the age of twenty, when he opened a brewery with one of his brothers. He then spent thirteen years as head chef to Christian IV, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken, an experience that gave him the skills of a court cook and a firm grounding in pastry and luxury preparations. From 1784 to 1795 he worked as a confectioner and chef in Paris, where he married Elisabeth Benoist and the couple had four children.
The Revolution placed him in a delicate position. He is linked to the execution of Louis XVI, but during the Terror he was arrested on suspicion in 1794 and managed to avoid execution himself. This uncertain period coincides with the time he began experimenting with preserving food. From 1795 he tried soups, vegetables, juices, dairy products, jellies, jams and syrups. He placed the food in glass jars, sealed them with cork and sealing wax, and subjected them to long heating in boiling water; later he switched to an autoclave. His contribution was to take a method that home cooks were believed to already use in a small way and bring it to an industrial scale.
The context explains why his method attracted attention. France was at war with much of Europe, and its armies needed provisions that would last through long campaigns. The government offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a reliable preservation system. After fourteen years of trials, Appert claimed it in 1810, though not on his first attempt: in 1806 he had shown a selection of bottled fruit and vegetables at the exhibition of French industrial products without receiving a reward. In 1810 the Ministry of the Interior awarded him the sum on condition that he make his process public, and that same year he published L'Art de conserver, the first book devoted to modern food preservation.
His factory, La Maison Appert, in Massy near Paris, is generally cited as the first commercial canning factory in the world, dating from around 1804. There he bottled meat, poultry, eggs, milk and prepared dishes. At first he used champagne bottles, closed imperfectly with a mixture of cheese and lime, and later thick, wide-mouthed glass bottles. He avoided tinplate early on because French tinplate was of poor quality. As a business, however, the firm was fragile: its equipment was expensive and Appert was not a gifted manager. He declared bankruptcy in 1806 but managed to carry on.
Appert never explained why his method worked, since bacteriology did not yet exist. Decades later Louis Pasteur attributed preservation to the destruction of the microorganisms that cause food to spoil. Meanwhile the system spread quickly because of its simplicity. In 1810 the British inventor Peter Durand patented the same idea using tin containers, and in 1812 the Englishmen Bryan Donkin and John Hall bought both patents and began producing preserves. The tin can, decisive for the industry's future, thus arrived through the work of others.
His later years were marked by hardship. The destruction of Massy by Prussian and Austrian troops at the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition in 1814 left him without a factory. With government support he opened another in Paris, where he worked with tin cans for about ten years until he was evicted in December 1827. In 1828 he set up yet another factory in the city. His canned goods were well received, especially by the navy, which preferred them to salted meat and the dried provisions used until then. They were exported to Bavaria and Saint Petersburg, and the French press praised them. Commercial success, however, never came. He received silver and gold medals from the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale in 1816 and 1820, and the money attached to them did not reach him until 1824.
He applied for admission to the Legion of Honour but was refused, possibly because of his role during the Revolution. He retired in 1836 and from that year received a pension of 1,200 francs a year, which was not enough to save him from poverty. He died in 1841 and was buried in a pauper's grave.
His legacy is recognised in several ways. France issued a postage stamp in his honour in 1955; a street in Paris, the Rue Nicolas-Appert, was named after him in 1985; a bronze statue by Jean-Robert Ipousteguy was erected in Châlons-en-Champagne in 1991; and the French ministry of culture declared 2010 a national Nicolas Appert Year. The term 'appertization' is still used for heat-based canning, and since 1942 the Chicago section of the Institute of Food Technologists has awarded a prize in his name. His figure belongs both to the history of industry and to the memory of cooking.
Key contributions
- A method of airtight heat preservation in glass containers, a precursor of modern sterilisation.
- The first commercial canning factory, at Massy around 1804, which marked the start of the canning industry.
- The book L'Art de conserver (1810), the first work on modern food preservation, which spread the method.
- The move to metal containers, which made transport and storage easier for navies and armies.
- The term 'appertization' for heat-based canning, still in use in the industry.