Tinned Beef a Century Old

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 15, 6 October 1939, Page 55

Tinned Beef a Century Old

When that great explorer Sir William Edward Parry went to find the North-west Passage, one of his ships, H.M.S. Fury, was wrecked on the ice and some stores were dumped. They were later recovered by Sir John Ross, brought back to England, and for more than a century lay in museums. Recently some of the "tins" were opened by skilled chemists and bacteriologists of a food research laboratory and their contents were examined. Parry’s "tins" or iron canisters of roast veal and gravy were as fresh as ever, They provided a striking testimony to the work of Nicholas Appert, that chef and pickler who was the father of canning, since he sealed foodstuffs in glass bottles knowing that bacteria could not undergo spontaneous generation. (It was one of the Appert family who canned a whole sheep and years later exhibited it fresh at a Paris Exhibition.) A similar examination of old canned foods would have been made long ago in the laboratory of a London hospital, but on that occasion some laboratory attendants smitten by hunger, consumed the contents before the bacteriologists got to work. What is astonishing about Parry’s roast veal is that in one or. two cases the provisioners of over a century ago had failed to follow Appert’s golden rule about completely sterilising the food before sealing. In the recent examination by Professor Drummond and his colleagues bacteria were found alive after more than a century in a metal coffin.