Today I wanted to add to the fun facts about canning history with this topic. Why are mason jars made of glass?  You may not have ever thought about it but sometimes odd questions like that come to me and I wonder why are mason jars not made out of clay like pottery or crocks? I also find it amazing that since canning was invented we still use the same basic design of glass jar. The only thing that has really changed about them is the method of sealing.   As I mentioned in a previous post, Nicolas Appert was the inventor of heat processing food preservation that he developed by placing cooked food in glass jars, removing as much air as possible and sealing the jars with corks that were wired in place then processed in a water bath.  He used glass because he believed that it was air that caused food spoilage and glass is not easily penetrated by air.  I also briefly documented the story of the inventor of the mason jar here.   Even though it wasn't known at...

Did you know? According to the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture; " American housewives canned more than four billion cans and jars of food in 1943, and nearly three and a half billion quarts of food in 1944. The latter represents nearly one-half of the canned vegetables and two-thirds of the canned fruits that were available for civilian consumption that year." That's a lot of canning! Did you know? That during WWI the US government  promoted the cultivation of “war gardens,” and later changed the name to “victory gardens” after the war was won and in order to maximize the utility of war gardens, the Federal Government emphasized a number of food preservation methods, namely canning, as a patriotic venture.  Numerous posters were produced during WWII emphasizing the correlation between canning and victory. Like the example below found in the public domain and courtesy of University of North Texas digital collections. Did you know? That in 1943 the USDA ...

When you hear the name Napoleon Bonaparte the last thing you associate it with is home canning. But actually he had everything to do with the development of food preservation. In the late 1700s when he noticed the high number of his soldiers that were suffering and dying from malnutrition, Napoleon offered a prize of twelve thousand Francs to anyone who could come up with a practical way to preserve food. The call was answered by an innovative chef name Nicolas Appert in 1810 when he presented Napoleon with his method of bottling fruits, vegetables and meats using heat to preserve them by boiling the sealed bottles in water.  He used his reward money to establish a cannery and later changed his preferred packaging container to tin cans. This was the beginning of commercial food  canning which has become commonplace to us. Home canning did not become a common practice in America until later in the 1800's with the invention of the screw cap mason jar and the needs of a pop...

No, this is not a recipe for canned weeds. I just wanted to write a short post about something I read about during my last search for unique jelly recipes to share. I ran across some historic recipe sites that talked about how things were in America during the great depression of the 1930's and in particular some families that endured living through the dust bowl right here in my state of Oklahoma. Times were hard then, I mean really hard, the only things that grew in the summer was weeds. People of all ages were dying from dust related respiratory illnesses and hunger and despair were widespread.  In order to feed their families, moms learned how to forage. They learned which weeds you could eat and they would can them up for eating in the long lean winter months. Tumbleweeds and lambs quarters were the weeds that kept them from starving, and many who remember eating them say that canned they tasted not much different than any other greens. I have actually eaten lambs ...

Today I thought it would be fun to look at some of the history of canning, and what better place to start than with a few fun facts about the history of the mason jar. It's funny how mason jars are something I use on a daily basis and yet I never really knew much about their interesting history before. I did a little researching and here is what I was able to find out. In the early 1800s glass jars called "wax sealers"  were commonly used for home canning. These were invented by a French chef named Nicolas Appert. They looked more like an apothecary bottle than a jar and had a wide lip that you poured wax into to secure a tin lid.  The complicated process was prone to errors but it was the only method available at the time. Later in the century zinc screw on lids were invented which were the predecessors of the screw on lids that we use today. In 1857 a man named John Landis Mason who was a tinsmith in Vineland New Jersey invented and patented the first screw cap bott...