Appert’s evaporated milk was the genesis of a tapered path to the canned version we see in stores today. The next phase of the evolution took place in 1853 when an American inventor named Gail Borden filed a patent for evaporating milk in a vacuum. Borden used this method to combine evaporated milk with sugar to create sweetened condensed milk, an essential field ration during yet another conflict—the American Civil War.
But it was a Swiss man named John B. Meyenberg who realized the unsweetened potential of evaporated milk. When Meyenberg’s sugar-free canned milk idea got little traction in his native land, he traveled across the Atlantic to Highland, Illinois. Here, along with a group of Swiss dairy farmers, he established the foremost evaporated milk plant in the US and the world. In 1884, Meyenberg patented “a process of sterilization by steam under pressure while the cans are agitated,” and the following year, the first canned evaporated milk was commercially manufactured. Today Borden’s method of vacuum evaporation and Meyenberg’s process of pressurized sterilization remain key foundations of the industry.
There was still one more problem to solve. The evaporation process caused the fat and water to separate, leading to an unemulsified final product. As a solution, hom*ogenization was introduced in 1909, which took evaporated milk to new heights. The product, now emulsified as milk should be, not only had a significantly longer shelf life but was much more appealing to consumers in its amalgamated state.
During World War I, evaporated milk went to combat again, this time with the armed forces of the United States and its allies. It was “hailed as a boon to the fighting man.” After the war, it lived on through the discharged soldiers who continued to use the product in their civil lives.
What can’t evaporated milk do?
For many Americans, evaporated milk might seem like a relic of the past, but for those of Latin heritage, it’s a conduit to culture. “There is a very distinctive flavor that many of us grew up with which cannot be replicated with any other ingredient,” says the author of Mi Cocina, Rick Martinez. “If you were to use fresh milk or cream instead of evaporated milk, it would seem incomplete,” he explains, “like making a cake and forgetting to add vanilla.”
Nik Sharma, author of The Flavor Equation, likens this unique taste to a mild caramelly note that the milk develops during the evaporation process. Sharma tells me that this makes evaporated milk an excellent ingredient in South Asian desserts like kheer as it helps cut down the cooking time otherwise required to develop those toasty, nutty flavors.
But the flavor is only half of the incomparable equation. “Evaporated milk makes desserts more luxurious, more tender, more rich without adding a lot of extra fat if you were to use cream,” says Martinez. Similarly, it brings creaminess to soups and stews, but more interestingly, Martinez says that it can be quite efficient in tenderizing meats. Sharma agrees. “Salts help meat turn tender but also increase their water-holding capacity,” he explains, and evaporated milk is rich in a particularly powerful form of salt called phosphates.
