ABSTRACT
At the end of the eighteenth century, Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner, developed an original method of preserving large amounts of foods for long periods. The “appertization” industry was thus born in 1795 at Ivry-sur-Seine, near Paris, where Appert began to elaborate heat-preserved food products. The canning of foods is conducive to creating anaerobic conditions; hence, low-acid foods even slightly contaminated with Clostridium botulinum spores receiving inadequate heat treatment, allowed to stand for a time and eaten undercooked may cause botulism. Food canning was empirically invented. The process was soon improved in England, where a method of sealing food into unbreakable cylindrical tin or wrought-iron canisters was developed. Thermobacteriology is dedicated, on the one hand, to studying undesirable heat-resistant microorganisms potentially present in canned foods, and, on the other hand, to studying heat transfers in canned foods during thermal processing.
