How Tinned Fish Was Invented: A Confectioner, a Prize from Napoleon, and the Sardine That Conquered the World
The sardine tin on your shelf exists because armies kept starving. In the 1790s, revolutionary France was fighting on several fronts and losing more soldiers to spoiled food and scurvy than to enemy fire, and in 1795 the government offered a prize of twelve thousand francs to anyone who could find a way to keep food edible for months. The person who claimed it was not a scientist. He was a Paris confectioner named Nicolas Appert.
Appert's idea was almost stupidly simple, which is why it worked. He packed food into thick glass bottles, sealed them with cork and wax, and boiled the sealed bottles in water for hours. Meat, vegetables, milk, fruit: all of it kept. He did not know why. Louis Pasteur would not explain that microbes cause spoilage and heat kills them for another half century. Appert only knew that it worked, tested it on the French navy, and collected his prize in 1810, the same year he published his method in a book whose title translates as The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years. Every tin in our shop descends from that book.
The tin arrives
Glass was heavy and broke on campaign. Within months of Appert's publication, an English merchant named Peter Durand patented the idea of using tinned iron canisters instead, and by 1813 the engineers Bryan Donkin and John Hall were running a cannery in Bermondsey, London, supplying the Royal Navy. Early tins were made by hand, soldered shut, thick enough that soldiers opened them with bayonets, chisels or rifle fire. The can opener was not invented until 1858. For nearly fifty years, humanity had canned food and no good way into it.
The first sardine
Fish was the obvious candidate for the new technology, since it spoils faster than almost anything else, and the first person to tin it commercially was Joseph Colin, in Nantes on France's Atlantic coast, in 1824. He packed sardines in oil, following the local habit of preserving fish in butter or oil, and the product was so good that Brittany's coast filled with canneries within a generation. The sardine was perfect for the tin: small, oily, abundant, and better for the cooking it received inside the can. A sardine cooked in its own oil under pressure emerged softer, richer and more digestible than a fresh one, bones and all. The tin did not merely preserve the fish. It improved it.
Portugal, Galicia and the great boom
The technology moved south along the coast to where the sardines were. Portugal opened its first canneries in the 1850s, in the Algarve and then around Setúbal, Lisbon and the northern port of Matosinhos, and by the early twentieth century the country was one of the largest fish canners on earth. Galicia, on Spain's northwest corner, followed with its own specialty: the rías, the drowned river valleys where mussels, cockles, clams and razor clams grow in extraordinary abundance, gave Galician canners a shellfish tradition that no other coast could match. Our guides to Conservas de Cambados and Ramón Peña tell that story from the inside.
The two world wars were the industry's making. Tinned sardines fed soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, and neutral Portugal exported them to both sides in the Second. Canneries multiplied into the hundreds; a Portuguese fishing town could have a dozen factories on its waterfront, staffed overwhelmingly by women who cleaned, packed and sealed the fish by hand. The tin became a cheap protein for the poor and a wartime lifeline for everyone, which is why, for most of the twentieth century, it carried no glamour at all.
The decline
After the wars, refrigeration, frozen fish and cheap fresh protein made the tin look like the past. Portugal's cannery count collapsed from the 1960s onward; Brittany's did the same. What survived were the producers who never lowered their standards, who kept packing by hand, kept using olive oil, kept buying the best fish on the day, and sold to a shrinking group of people who knew the difference. A few families in Galicia, Portugal, Brittany and Cantabria carried the craft through decades in which it was unfashionable.
The revival
Then the tin came back, and it came back beautiful. In the 2010s Lisbon shops began selling tins as design objects, wrapped in illustrated paper, and Portuguese brands like José Gourmet commissioned artists for every label; our guide to their sardines in Azores butter is a case study in how far the idea has gone. Chefs in New York, Copenhagen and San Francisco put tinned fish on tasting menus. Bars built menus around opened tins the way Spanish bodegas had always done, which we cover in our guide to the vermut hour. A generation that grew up on tuna salad discovered that a tin of Galician cockles or Cantabrian anchovies was one of the best things a person could eat at any price.
Something else changed. The tin, once the proof that a food was cheap, became the proof that it was serious. The sardines are still small, oily, abundant and better for the cooking they receive in the can. What changed was that people started paying attention to who packed them, in what oil, from which coast, and how long ago. That attention is the whole basis of a shelf like ours.
What the history explains about the tin in your hand
Why the best tins are packed in olive oil: because oil was the original medium, from Nantes onward, and the fish keeps improving in it for years. Why a tin has a date but rarely a "best by" that matters: because the sealed can is, functionally, Appert's jar, and properly made conservas age like wine rather than spoil. Why hand-packing matters: because the industry's survivors were the ones who never automated the part that decides quality. Why the label is beautiful now: because the revival was, in part, a design movement. And why you should keep a few tins in the pantry at all times: because that is what they were invented for, two centuries ago, by a man who made candy.
The complete guide to our tinned fish covers what to buy; our pieces on storage after opening and using the oil cover what happens next. More than 150 tins from Portugal, Galicia, Brittany, Cantabria, Denmark and beyond are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Appert would have been astonished, and then, we suspect, hungry.
