There is a story that when French
scientist and inventor Deins Papin (1647-1712) first demonstrated his
wonderfully named ‘digester’ to London’s Royal
Society in 1679, the device exploded.
So another invention swiftly came into being: “Papin’s Safety Valve”,
which went on to have other applications.
By 1682, a refined version of the
steam digester proved excellent at cooking food and making nutritious bones
soft and tasty. After a demonstration
dinner at the Royal Society in that year, one guest, leading horticulturalist
John Evelyn noted in his diary that food served from the digester was among the
most delicious that I have ever seen or tasted.
Papin was an interesting
character of diverse scientific interest.
Trained in medicine as a young man, he had long been interested in food
preservation. His tightly sealed digester
vessel showed how atmospheric pressure affected boiling points. Under high pressure water in the vessel
produced steam that cooked food quickly at temperature far higher than those
possible in a saucepan. The cooked food
was meltingly soft, its nutrients and flavor were preserved, and the cooker
used little fuel. Papin quickly saw that
the impoverished were among those who
would benefit greatly from his device.
Papin went on the experiment
which similar principals in various important early steam-engine prototypes
that he developed. Meanwhile his
digester also informed the history of the autoclave (whose use include
sterilizing medical instruments) and became the modern pressure cooker, which
still works very much to his template.
“Mass uptake of Papin’s idea of
cooking food under high pressure had to wait until the twentieth century”.
