Mr. Gail Borden (1801–1874) formulated the invention for canned condensed milk in 1851, worked and perfected it for a few years, and received a patent in 1857. His patent consisted of a process to evaporate milk, sugar helping as a preservative.
Condensed milk is the sweetened type of canned milk, evaporated milk is the unsweetened.
Borden’s condensed milk was supplied to Northern soldiers during the Civil War, and the soldiers brought news of it to their families, popularizing Borden’s Eagle Brand Condensed Milk.
Evaporated milk, the unsweetened milk, was more of a challenge to preserve as it lacked sugars. Canned evaporated milk was invented in 1885—not by Borden—but Borden’s Peerless Brand Evaporated Cream debuted in 1892. The first ad I found for Borden’s evaporated product was 1894. It was called a cream, not a milk. The picture here of the two products is from 1898 advertised in “To the Klondike Gold Fields” as canned milk were important stock items for the adventurous stampeders.
Closer to home than the Alaskan Klondike—what a god-send canned milk must have been for people without a cow or goat, etc. who relied on root cellars or the new invention of ice boxes to keep the home deliveries of fresh milk COLD.
Even groceries sold no fresh milk, only canned milk, as it was shelf stable.
In the 1920s – 1930s keeping fresh milk safe became easier because people had their own electric refrigerators, so the demand for canned milk waned.
The first refrigerated grocery cases were available in 1934, though it wasn’t until the 1940s that refrigerated cases really began to be seen in stores. Until then, and even into the 1950s, local dairies delivered fresh milk directly to most homes, every day.
My grandfather had a cow in a relatively dense population in the 1900s-1910s, as there was a nearby pasture which is now a hotel. He had about 20 children so the amount of milk produced by one cow each day was not at risk of going bad in a small ice box. But later, his younger children acquired a taste for evaporated milk, probably from the 1920s – 1930s when their family no longer had their cow. New Englanders loved evaporated milk in chowders, let alone for that unique somewhat caramelized taste in desserts.
This ain’t the prettiest of recipe booklets, [reddit] but to me, evap. milk with its unique creamy caramelized taste makes for an entry into my interesting ingredients list.
