From Roman Quinces to Mason Jars: A Short History of Jam

A jar of jam comes down to fruit, sweetener and heat, and each of the three had a long history before they came together in one pan. A Roman recipe kept quinces in honey. A Renaissance physician published a treatise on preserves. A French confectioner worked out how to seal food against spoiling, and an American patented a screw-thread jar neck. A chemist named the substance that makes fruit set, and in the twentieth century governments wrote down how much fruit the word jam has to mean. This is that history, with a timeline at the end. The jam and preserves guide covers choosing and using a jar today.

Honey and the quince: Rome

The Roman cookbook that goes under the name of Apicius has a recipe for quinces that does not cook the fruit down into a spread. It keeps the whole fruit in a sweet liquid. In Joseph Dommers Vehling's translation, the recipe tells the cook to pick out perfect quinces with their stems and leaves, set them in a vessel, and pour honey and defrutum over them to keep them for a long time. Vehling's editorial note is blunt: the method would not keep the fruit long unless the vessel had a tight cover and was sterilized. Honey's history before sugar is the subject of the history of honey article.

The quince also gave English its word for the best-known preserve. Marmalade entered English in the 1530s, by way of French from the Portuguese marmelada, quince jelly, from marmelo, quince. Further back it runs through Latin to the Greek melimelon, honey apple. In English it first meant a quince confection of pulpy consistency, and only in the seventeenth century did it stretch to cover preserves made from citrus. Quince paste is closer to the older sense of the word, and the fruit pastes guide covers it.

Sugar and the physician: 1555

The history of sugar article tells how sugar went from a costly spice to an everyday commodity. Better known today for his prophecies, Michel de Nostredame, a physician settled in Salon-de-Provence, also published a book of recipes. It was printed in Lyon by Antoine Volant with the date 1555, and its preface is dated 1 April 1552. The first part deals with cosmetics. The second is a treatise on confitures, preserves made with sugar, honey or defrutum. A modern French edition calls it a work that is little known, if known at all, although in his lifetime things were quite otherwise.

Heat and the seal: 1810 and 1858

The problem Vehling flagged was solved in France. In June 1810 Nicolas Appert published L'Art de conserver pendant plusieurs années toutes les substances animales et végétales, the art of preserving animal and vegetable substances for several years. His method was to close food in sealed glass bottles and heat them in a bath of boiling water, a bain-marie. His preserves included fruits and vegetables. The French government awarded him 12,000 francs, and he took the prize over patent rights. Applied to tin rather than glass, the same principle later gave rise to the sardine tin, a story told in the history of tinned fish article.

The screw-thread jar followed. On 30 November 1858 John L. Mason received US patent 22,186 for "Improvements in the Necks of Bottles, Jars, &c." The patent describes a screw thread that fades into the neck at both ends rather than running to the rim or the shoulder, which let a cap and a rubber washer seal the jar against air and water.

The set gets a name

The substance that makes fruit set got its name in the nineteenth century. The French chemist Henri Braconnot described acide pectique, pectic acid, a substance found in fruit jellies, and coined pectine from it. He took the word from the Greek pektos, curdled or congealed. English had the word pectin by 1838.

The jar becomes a business

Dundee tells the founding story of commercial marmalade. As the city's Women's Trail recounts it, Janet Keiller was left with a consignment of bitter oranges that a Spanish shipmaster had sold her husband John, boiled them up, and made the first chip marmalade, with the peel cut in strips. In 1797, when she and John were both sixty, she went into business with her son James, trading at first as James Keiller. The marmalade guide picks up the story from there.

In Essex, fruit growing turned into jam making. After Prime Minister Gladstone encouraged the British public to preserve fruit, Arthur Charles Wilkin formed the Britannia Fruit Preserving Company at Tiptree in 1885, and its first preserves all went to a merchant who shipped them to Australia. Within ten years the farm was producing more than 200 tons of fruit, half of it used for jam. The business became Wilkin and Sons and received its first Royal Warrant from George V in 1911.

In Ohio, Jerome Monroe Smucker built a cider mill in Orrville in 1897 and sold cider and apple butter door to door from a horse-drawn wagon. National distribution began in 1942, when the company shipped fruit spreads to Los Angeles.

The law decides what jam means

Once jam was an industry, the word needed a definition. In the United States, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 gave the government power to set standards of identity, in part to protect the public from inferior foods that resembled standard products but were sold under distinctive names. Jams and jellies got the second set of standards, after tomato products. The FDA's own history calls it a relatively easy standard to write, since cookbooks more than two hundred years old agreed that jellies should be about half fruit or juice and half sugar. The regulation came in 1940 and required at least 45 parts fruit by weight. In 1951 the Supreme Court, in 62 Cases of Jam v. United States, held that a product with 25 percent fruit could still be sold if it was plainly labeled imitation jam.

Europe wrote its rules later and drew the lines differently. Council Directive 2001/113/EC of 20 December 2001 sets separate grades for jam and extra jam and keeps the word marmalade for citrus alone, a long way from its quince origins.

Both systems count the fruit that goes into the pan, not what remains after the boil. A US jar labeled strawberry preserves and a European jar labeled extra jam are therefore answering the same question, how much fruit went in, with different yardsticks. The article on jam, preserves, marmalade and fruit butter sets out how the names differ in the kitchen.

A timeline of the jar

Read top to bottom, the timeline shows the jar being assembled piece by piece: a sweetener that became affordable, a seal that became reliable, a set that finally had a name, and a word that the law pinned to a fruit weight. Makers today build on all four. Brins pairs wild blueberry with sumac (shop Brins Wild Blueberry Sumac Spread) and makes a lemon marmalade with saffron (shop Brins Lemon Saffron Marmalade), and the Brins producer guide covers the maker. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

• Apicius, Book I, trans. Joseph Dommers Vehling (LacusCurtius, University of Chicago)
• Online Etymology Dictionary: marmalade
• Online Etymology Dictionary: pectin
• IRHT-CNRS Bibale: Nostradamus, Excellent et moult utile opuscule, Lyon, 1555
• Éditions Imago: Nostradamus, Traité des confitures, introduction
• Fondation Napoléon: Appert et l'invention de la conserve
• US Patent 22,186: John L. Mason, Improvements in the Necks of Bottles, Jars, &c., 1858
• Dundee Women's Trail: Janet Keiller
• Wilkin and Sons: A Potted History
• Encyclopedia of Cleveland History: The J.M. Smucker Company
• US FDA: Food Standards under the 1938 Act, Bread and Jam
• 62 Cases of Jam v. United States, 340 U.S. 593 (1951)
• 21 CFR 150.160: Fruit preserves and jams
• Council Directive 2001/113/EC, Annexes