HEAT UP A CAN

If you grew up dipping your grilled cheese into tomato soup, or picking the mini burgers out of the broth and veggies, you’ve enjoyed one of the most popular – and enduring – inventions of the late 19th century.
People have been trying to preserve food as long as they’ve been eating, but the idea of putting up and saving large quantities really took off during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French government offered a prize for inventions. Nicholas Appert won for his idea to use jars, but it took a few more years, and several different inventors to move over to cans.
By 1812, the U.S. was in the lead, with the first-ever canned food factory opening in New York. Robert Ayars’ plant put everything from oysters to fruit up in tin-plated wrought-iron cans. (That’s why Grandma and Grandpa still call them tin cans.)
At first, they were fashionable novelties for the middle class, but companies quickly realized that plenty of folks appreciated the convenience, and started selling mass-market products at more approachable prices. Soon, too, wars in Europe and the Civil War at home gave the canned food industry a huge boost.
Soup initially was one of the tougher, and higher-end items because of its water content. Everyone was paying an awful lot to move those slurpy cans of liquid, making a cheap product prohibitively expensive to ship.
That all changed in 1897, when Campbell Soup Company Chemist John T. Dorrance realized that he could remove the heaviest part of the soup – the water – and make it much easier to ship. Easier and cheaper, of course.
And so was born the “one can of soup to one can of water or milk” ratio that was the first meal preparation many of us did on our own. The first flavors? Consommé, chicken, vegetable, ox tail…and our good friend tomato.
Canned soup quickly took off across the social spectrum. It was just as good as a simple and filling companion for a working family’s bread as a fancy appetizer in a middle-class home. You can tell by the flavors offered that the makers were aiming for a wide audience: mock turtle, julienne, and cream of celery shared the shelves with the ox tail.
Later in the 20th century, those cream soups gained new attention, and later infamy, as the base for all kinds of casserole creations from housewives inspired by glossy magazines. These days, it’s fashionable to down on them, and sanctimoniously say that you make your OWN mushroom soup, thank you.
Not quite fair, in my humble and personal. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t go to the barricades for cream of celery…but I can’t be the only person who finds Grandma’s Thanksgiving green beans or potluck tuna-noodle a real comfort once in a while!
Canned soup also came full circle toward the end of the 20th century, and after, with premium un-condensed offerings like the mini-burger soup many of us love -- and more of us won’t admit to loving! Some soup went even higher-end; many gourmet companies offer things like lobster bisque in cans even now.
Whether you use it for kids’ lunch, casserole, or a solo dinner in front of the TV, canned soup is one of the rare foods from the 19th century that is still very similar to its original form…and at least for me, that just adds to the comfort! Guess what dinner is at my house tonight?

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