Napoleon Bonaparte, who is credited with the phrase, “better fed armies will win”, offered a prize of 12000 francs to anyone who could invent some way of keeping food fresh for a long period of time in 1795. He did this because many sailors under his command fell ill due to scurvy. They were lacking in vitamin C because they based their diet on smoked, salted or fermented foods.
It was when Nicolas Appert, a French baker and oenologist, came up with the idea that food could be kept intact without losing its nutritional properties by hermetically closing them in glass containers. The method, called the appertization process, was to close the glass bottle with the food that was to be preserved with a cork stopper and to put it in another container with boiling water at 100ºC. Appert produced a manual entitled «The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years«. This made him the winner of 12,000 francs.
It was Peter Durand who took the patent and modified it ten years later. He created the tins that the English Bryan Donkin and John Hall would distribute in their cannery later.
In 1840, the wreck in Finesterre of a French sailboat would make this technique known in Galician lands. At that time in Galicia, people only used methods of salting or smoking for the preservation of food.
At the beginning of last century, this technique began to grow. From the 1960s onwards, sunflower oil was used for canning in southern Spain, and it was when they saw the good results obtained with this oil that they decided to improve the technique. They instead started preserving with EVOO, the cream of the crop of the oils used for fish and seafood preservesthat gives an incomparable nutritional and healthy value.
In the case of tuna, many nutritionists recommend it to be only boiled, so that a greater amount of extra fat is not consumed. However, they do admit, that if tuna is preserved in EVOO, the combined nutritional properties of the preserves are much more beneficial and long lasting. Not only that, it gives the tuna quite an exquisite flavor that does not exist when it is eaten by itself.