13 Oct /15

Mason Jar

Mason Jar – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Mason Jar – Word of the day – EVS Translations

The glass jar our mothers and grandmothers made jams and pickled vegetables in is returning as a trending multi-purpose item, with its recent popularity pushed by millennials and adored by hipsters. The Mason Jar is the typical drink-ware for juices and smoothies in most hip bars and restaurants, many recipes call for salads and deserts in Mason Jars and our homes are all about the canning jars, with DIY 101 uses of the old Mason jar, from practical food storing and serving container, through candle-holder and vase to soup dispenser, piggy-bank, and even collector’s piece.

And the jar, is indeed, 150 years old. Originally a moulded glass jar with a screw top used for home canning and food preservation at a time before refrigeration, the Mason jar was invented and first patented by John Landis Mason in 1858. Though it may be known by its more generalised form as a fruit or glass canning jar or by the company that manufactures it, such as Ball or Kerr in the United States, Bernardin in Canada, Kilner in the UK, and Weck in Germany, many still refer to it using the name of the inventor.

For an item that can now be purchased in locations from the Internet to IKEA to country/general stores and has annual sales that, if the jars were placed end to end, almost circle the globe, it is important to understand what made them so widely in demand initially. While canning had become more widespread thanks to innovations in Napoleonic France, previous to Mason, the jars had been sealed using wax, which was complicated, prone to error, and resulting in wasted food. Comparatively, Mason jars improved the process of food canning by making it standardised, durable, and safer – the wax seal was replaced by the comforting and familiar “ping” of a properly sealed jar.

Presumably, people began clamouring to purchase “John Mason’s jar” soon after it was invented; however, the first recorded usage of the word occurred some years earlier, in an 1885 edition of the New York Weekly Tribune, writing that, “The Illinois Agricultural Society calls attention to the fact that Mason fruit-jars have been sent to that State packed in straw foul with Canada thistle.” Approximately 3 decades after the invention, we can see how common usage of these jars had become, as one recipe of Mrs. Lavinia Hargis, in The Graded Cook Book (1888) states: “Quince and apple butter… Put a little of the mixture in a plate and invert, if it adheres the butter is done. Fill Mason jars and seal.” Frankly stating the situation in 1920, William Walbridge summarises in American Bottles Old and New that, “Until 1857, the date of the advent of the Mason screw top jar, the only method was by sealing a jar by any process which happened to appeal to the housewife.”