under clarified butter In fact the term is a fairly inclusive one It comes via the French verb confire, from the Latin conficere, meaning “to do, to produce, to make, to prepare.” The French verb was first applied in medieval times to fruits cooked and preserved in sugar syrup or honey (hence French confiture and English confection) or in alcohol Later it was applied to vegetables pickled in vinegar, olives in oil, various foods in salt, and meats under fat The general sense has been to immerse a food in and often impregnate it with a substance that both flavors it and preserves it In modern usage of the term confit, the connotations of immersion, impregnation, flavoring, and slow, deliberate preparation survive, while the idea of preservation — and the special flavors that develop over weeks and months — has faded away Canned Meats Canned Meats Around 1800, a French brewer and confectioner named Nicolas Appert discovered that if he sealed food in a glass container and then heated the container in boiling water, the food would keep indefinitely without spoiling This was the beginning of canning, a form of preservation in which the food is first isolated from air and external contamination by microbes, and then heated sufficiently to destroy any microbes already in the food (Pasteur hadn’t yet proven the existence of microbes; Appert simply observed that all “ferments” were destroyed in his process.) When done properly, canning is quite effective: canned meat a century old has been eaten without harm, if also without much pleasure The canning of meats is almost exclusively an industrial process today, in part because it offers the cook little in the way of desirable flavors or textures ... Around 1800, a French brewer and confectioner named Nicolas Appert discovered that if he sealed food in a glass container and then heated the container in boiling water, the food would keep indefinitely without spoiling... indefinitely without spoiling This was the beginning of canning, a form of preservation in which the food is first isolated from air and external contamination by microbes, and then heated sufficiently to destroy any microbes... heated sufficiently to destroy any microbes already in the food (Pasteur hadn’t yet proven the existence of microbes; Appert simply observed that all “ferments” were destroyed in his process.) When done properly, canning is