San Francisco has always been an arbiter of California culture, and this was as true a century ago as it is today. It is home to its own specialty cuisine, as well as a unique variety of sourdough bread, the place where steamed beer was born, and its proximity to the Pacific Ocean has given San Francisco a well-earned reputation as a place where you can always eat delicious seafood. some very specific to the region, such as Dungeness crab.
California itself is a vast agricultural state that provides the rest of the country with fresh vegetables and fruits and, of course, is the largest wine producer in the United States. What is less well known is that San Francisco played an important role in promoting the export of food through canning at a time when it was not possible to refrigerate trucks and trains.
Canning and preserving food is something we take for granted now, and canned foods are often considered inferior to fresh. But this was not always the case. The history of preserving food in cans or glass jars dates back to 1795 when the French army, at the urging of Napoleon himself, offered a reward to anyone who could devise a method of preserving food on long military marches. and campaigns. An inventor named Nicolas Appert came forward who suggested sealing food in metal containers and then pasteurizing it by raising the temperature of the sealed food enough to kill any microorganisms inside. The system worked and was tested in a test with the French navy in 1806. Appert took the award in 1810.
By the early 1820s, canning had taken hold in New York and California, with Robert Ayars establishing the first American canning factory in Manhattan in 1812. By 1888, Max Ams had invented double seals, creating the modern label airtight than we know in canned food products today. This is the type of can with a cylindrical body made of anodized steel, with the two ends joined by double stitching. Therefore, the sealed can did not need to be soldered, which was often a source of lead contamination and poisoning.
Although canning was used by various armies throughout the 19th century, that was done more out of necessity than because the food tasted better, and it took a while for the notion of canned foods for sale in neighborhood grocery stories to spread. secure. It wasn’t until later in the 19th century that it came into general use by the public, especially in California, where fresh vegetables and fruits were available year-round. West Coast cooks generally viewed canned goods as inferior to fresh produce, but this began to change in 1916 when a San Francisco chef and socialite became a strong advocate of canning as a method of increasing food. variety of foods available in daily meals.
Sarah M. Williamson was a wealthy single woman from San Francisco, born in 1878. By the mid-thirties she had a wide circle of friends that stretched across the continent; he knew all the important families west of the Mississippi. As such, his views were influential.
“Why ban canned goods?” he wrote in 1916. “Especially in this state, where the most delicious fruits, vegetables and meats come in cans? Wonderful dishes can be made out of cans,” he added. “People who have not experimented with canned goods, or who consider them unhealthy, make a huge mistake. Most great foods can be obtained from cans. With canned peas, beans, and asparagus, you can make a perfect salad, and The Sliced canned tomatoes also work well in salads. A can of oxtail soup used for the gravy broth transforms a second day cut of meat into a stew or fancy roast that a foodie would enjoy. “
Commercial canning was relatively new in 1916 and its commercial success could have gone either way. While California was a source for canned goods in the East, local chefs felt they were best destined for remote locations where fresh food was simply not available. It was voices like Sarah Williamson’s that helped change that perception, and it was she who recognized that canned food was always preferable to stale food, in those early days before refrigeration, which had been left in the pantry for too many days. .
Sarah Williamson had relationships with many famous people of her time. He discovered, for example, that Jack London, the famous writer, was very particular about the way he liked to cook his rice, and convinced Jack London’s wife to part ways with her husband’s favorite recipe, which he published in a local newspaper.
Sarah Williamson is not a well-remembered figure in the 21st century, although she clearly did play a role in San Francisco’s culinary history and may have had an effect on the evolution of taste and culture in California, promoting as she did in the second decade. . of the 20th century, a technology that was new then, but still viewed with suspicion by many housewives and, indeed, sometimes dismissed as unhealthy. The California of 1916 was beginning to develop a sense of its modern place, culture, and environment, and food packaging would help make California a major exporter to the United States and even the rest of the world.
